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WET DAYS 

AT E D G E TV O O D: 



WITH 



Old Farmers, Old Gardeners, and 
Old Pastorals. 



BY THE AUTHOR OF 



"MY FARM OF KDGEVVOOD." 



NEW YORK: 

CHARLES SCREEN ER. 

1865. 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the 3'ear 1864, by 

Charles Scribner, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the 

Southern District of New York. 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE : NEW YORK : 

STEREOTrPED BT H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. PRINTED BY JOHN F. TROW. 



Pebicatton. 



CHARLES SGRIBNER, 

IN TOKEN UF MY RESPECT FOR HIS LITERARY JUDGMENT 

MY GRATITUDE FOR HIS UNIFORM COURTESY; 

AND MY CONFIDENCE IN HIS 

FRIENDSHIP 



CONTENTS. 



FIRST DAY. 

Without and Within, ... 1 

IIesiod and UoMm, . . .... 10 

Xenophox, ... 15 

Theocritus and Les.ser Poets, 21 

Cato, 20 

Varro, .... SO 

COLOMBLLA, 33 

A Roman Dream, . 39 

SECOXD DAY. 

A'lEGIL, . . 44 

An Episode, .... 54 

TnsoLLus ASD HoBAc:;, 58 

Plist-s Countev-Places, 60 

Palladids, . 67 

Professor Daubeny, 68 

The Dark Age, 69 

Geoponica Geoponicorum, 71 

Cresoenzi, 77 

A Florenti.ne Farm, 81 

THIRD DAY. 

A Picture op Raiv, 85 

Southern France and Troubadours, 87 

Among the Italians, 91 

Conrad Uerksbacu, 101 

La Maison Rustique, 110 

French Ruralisms, 115 

A Minnesinger, 124 



vi CONTENTS. 

FACIE 

FOURTH DAY. 

Piers Ploi^ian, ... . 126 

The Farmer of Chaucer's Tnic, 130 

Sir Antcont Fitz-herbert, 134 

Thomas Tusser, 138 

Sir nuGH Platt, 142 

Gervase Markham, . . ■ . 146 

FIFTH DA Y. 

English Weather, 155 

Time of James tsu, First, 160 

SAiniEL Hartub, 165 

Period of the CoiinroNWEAi.Ta and RestoiiatiOX 169 

Old English Homes, 177 

A Brace of Pastorals, 182 

SIXTH DA Y. 

A British Tavern, 185 

Early English Gardeners, 189 

Jethro Till, 195 

IIanbury and Lancelot Brotvn, 202 

William Shenstone, 205 

SEVENTH DAY. 

John Abercrombie, . 212 

A Philosopher and Two Poets, 216 

Lord Kames, 221 

Claridge, Mills, and Miller, 227 

Thojias Whatelt, 230 

Horace Walpole, .... 2S5 

Edmund Burke, . 239 

Goldsmith, 242 

EIGHTH DA Y. 

Arthur Young, 248 

Ellis and Eakewell, 254 

William Cowper, ... 259 

Gilbert White, 262 



CONTENTS. vii 

PARE 

Trusler asd FARM-PBorrrs, .... . . 264 

Sisci-ilR AKD Others, . . 26i) 

Old Age of Fahmers, . . 271 

BURXS AND Uloomfield, . . 276 

COD.NTRV STORr-TELLKRS, 280 

NINTH DAY. 

British Progress ix AoRicai-TuaE. ... . 28i 

Opening op the Century, . . 289 

Sib Humphry Davy, 291 

BlBKBECK, BEATSON, AND FlNLAYSON, 296 

William Cobbeit, ... 297 

GRAHAME AND Crabbe 305 

Charles Lamb, .... 307 

The Ettbick Suepherd, .... . . 310 

LOODON, ... oil 

A Bevy of 1'oets, . . . . 315 

L'Exvoi. . 323 



FIRST DAY. 



WitJiout and Within. 

XT is raining ; and being in-doors, I look out from my 
-*- library-window, across a quiet country-road, so near 
that I could toss my pen into the middle of it. 

A thatched stile is opposite, flanked by a straggling 
hedge of Osage-orange ; and from the stile the ground 
falls awaj' in green and gradual slope to a great plateau 
of measured and fenced fields, checkered, a month smce, 
with bluish lines of Swedes, with the ragged purple of 
mangels, and the feathery emerald-green of carrots. 
There are mnber-colored patches of fresh-turned fur- 
rows ; here and there the mossy, luxurious verdure of 
new-springing rye ; gray stubble ; the ragged brown of 
discolored, frostbitten rag-weed ; next, a line of tree- 
tops, thickening as they drop to the near bed of a river, 
and beyond the river-basin showing again, with tufts of 
hemlock among naked oaks and maples; then roofs, 
cupolas, anjbitious lookouts of suburban houses, spires, 



2 WET DAYS. 

belfries, turrets : all these conuiiingiing in a long line 
of white, brown, and gray, which in sunny weather is 
backed by purple hills, and flanked one way by a 
shining streak of water, and the other by a stretch of 
low, wooded mountains that turn from purple to blue, 
and so blend with the northern sky. 

Is the picture clear ? A road ; a farm-flat of party- 
colored checkers ; a near wood, that conceals the sunk- 
en meadow of a river ; a farther wood, that skirts a 
town, — that seems to overgrow the town, so that only 
& confused line of roofs, belfries, spires, towers, rise 
above the wood ; and these tallest spires and turrets 
lying in relief against a purple hill-side, that is as far 
beyond the town as the town is beyond my window; 
and the purple hill-side trending southward to a lake- 
like gleam of water, where a light-house shines upon a 
point; and northward, as I said, these same purple hills 
bearing away to paler purple, and then to blue, and 
then to haze. 

Thus much is seen, when I look directly eastward ; 
but by an oblique glance southward (always from my 
library-window) the checkered farm-land is repeated in 
long perspective : here and there is a farmhouse with 
its clustered out-buildings ; here and there a blotch of 
wood, or of orcharding ; here and there a bright sheen 
of viinter-grain ; and the level ends only where a slight 
fringe of tree-tops, and the iron cordon of a railway 



WITHOUT AND WITHIN. S 

that leaps over a marshy creek upon trestle-work, 
separate it from Long Island Sound. 

To the north, under such oblique glance as can be 
caught, the farm-lands in smaller enclosiu-es stretch 
half a mile to the skirts of a quiet village. A few tall 
chimneys smoke there lazily, and below them you see as 
many quick and repeated puffs of white steam. Two 
wliite spires and a tower are in bold relief against the 
precipitous basaltic cliff, at whose foot the village seems 
to nestle. Yet the mountain is not wholly precipitous ; 
for the columnar masses have been fretted away by a 
thousand frosts, making a sloping debris below, and 
leaving above the iron-yellow scars of fresh cleavage, 
the older blotches of gray, and the still older stain of 
lichens. Nor is the summit bald, but tufted with dwarf 
cedars and oaks, which, as they file away on either 
flank, mingle with a heavier growth of hickories and 
chestnuts. A few stunted kalmias and hemlock-spruces 
have found foothold in the clefts upon the face of the 
rock, showing a tav/ny green, that blends prettily with 
the scars, lichens, and weather-stains of the cliff; all 
which show under a sunset light richly and changefully 
as the breast of a dove. 

But just now there is no glow of sunset; raining 
still. Indeed, I do not know why I should have de- 
scribed at such length a mere landscape, (than which I 
know few fairer.) unless because of a rainy day it is 



4 WET DAYS. 

always in my eye, and that now, having invited a few 
outsiders to such entertainment as may belong to my 
wet farm-days, T should present to them at once my 
oldest acquaintajice, — the view from my library-win- 
dow. 

But as yet it is only coarsely outlined ; I warn the 
reader that I may return to the outside picture over 
and over again ; I weary no more of it than I weary 
of the reading of a fair poem ; no written rhythm can 
be more beguiling than the interchange of colors — 
wood and grain and river — all touched and toned by 
the wind, as a pleasant voice intones the shadows and the 
lights of a printed Idyl. And if, as to-day, the cloud- 
bank comes down so as to hide from time to time the 
remoter objects, it is but a cfesural pause, and anon the 
curtain lifts — the woods, the spires, the hills flow in, 
and the poem is complete. 

In that alcove of my library which immediately 
flanks the east window is bestowed a motley array of 
farm-books : there are fat ones in yellow vellum ; there 
are ponderous folios with stately dedications to 5:ome 
great man we never heard of ; there are thin tractates 
in ambitious type, which promised, fifty years and more 
ago, to overset all the established methods of farming ; 
there is Jethro Tull, in his irate way thrashing all down 
his columns the effete Virgilian husbandry ; there is the 
sententious talk of Cato, the latinitv of Columella, and 



WITHOUT AND WITHIN. 5 

some little musty duodecimo, hunted down upon \he 
quays of Paris, with such title as " Comes Rusticus " ; 
there is the first thin quarto of Judge Buel's " Culti- 
vator " — since expanded into the well-ordered state- 
liness of the " Country Gentleman " ; there are black- 
letter volumes of Barnaby Googe, and books compiled 
by the distinguished " Captaine Garvase Markhame " ; 
and there is a Xenophon flanked by a Hesiod, and the 
heavy Greek squadron of the " Geoponics." 

I delight immensely in taking an occasional wet- 
day talk with these old worthies. They were none of 
tliem chemists. I doubt if one of them could have 
made soil analyses which would have been worth any 
more, practically, than those of many of our agricultu- 
ral professors. Such powers of investigation as they 
had, they were not in the habit of wasting, and the 
results of their investigation were for the most part 
compactly managed. They put together their several 
budgets of common-sense notions about the practical 
art of husbandry, with good old-fashioned sturdiness and 
pointedness. And, after all — theorize as we will and 
dream as we will about new systems and scientific aids 
— there lies a mass of sagacious observation in the pages 
of the old teachers which can never be outlived, and 
which will contribute nearly as much to practical success 
in farming as the nice appliances of modern collegiate 
agriculture. Fortunately, however, it is not necessary 



6 WET DAYS. 

to go to the pages of old books for the traces and aims 
of that sagacity which has always underlaid the best 
practice. Its precepts have become traditional. 

And yet I delight in finding black-letter evidence 
of the age of the traditions and of the purity with which 
they have been kept. An important member of the 
County Society pays me a morning visit, and in the 
course of a field - stroll lays down authoritatively the 
opinion that " there 's no kmd o' use in ploughing for 
turnips in the spring, unless you keep the weeds down 
all through the season." I yield implicit and modest 
assent ; and on my next wet day find Ischomachus re- 
marking to Socrates,* — " This also, I think, it must be 
easy for you to understand, that, if ground is to lie fal- 
low to good purpose, it ought to be free from weeds, 
and warmed as much as possible by the sun." And yet 
my distinguished friend of the County Society is not a 
student of Xenophon. If I read out of the big book 
the same observation to my foreman (who is more 
piquant tlian gaiTulous), he says, — '• Xenophon, eh ! 
well, well — there 's sense in it." 

Again, the distinguished coimty member on some 
Sunday, between services, puts his finger in my button- 
hole, as we loiter under the lee side of tlie porch, and 
says, — "I tell i/ou, Squire, there a'n't no sort o' use in 
flinging about your hay, as most folks does. If it 's first 

* (Economicvs ; Chap. XVI. § 13. 



WITHOUT AND WTTHIN. 7 

year after seedin', and there 's a good deal o' clover in 
it, I lay it up in little cocks as soon as it 's wilted ; next 
morning I make 'em bigger, and after it 's sweat a day 
or so, I open it to dry off the steam a bit, and get it 
into the mow ; " — all which is most excellent advice, 
and worthy of a newspaper. But, on my next rainy day, 
I take up Heresbach,* and find Cono laying down the 
law for Rigo in this wise : — 

'• The grasse being cut, you are to consider of what 
nature the grasse is, whether very coarse and full of 
strong weedes, thicke leaves and great store of peony- 
grasse, or else exceeding fine and voyd of anything 
which asketh much withering ; If it be of the first kind, 
then after the mowing you shall first ted it, then raise 
it into little grasse Cockes as bigge as small molehills, 
after turne them, and make them up again, then spread 
them ; and after fidl drying put them into wind rowes, 
so into greater Cockes, then break those open, and after 
they have received the strength of the Sunne, then put 
three or four Cockes into one, and lastly leade them into 
the Barns." 

If I read this to my foreman, he says, '' There 's sense 
in that." 

And when I render to hun out of the epigram- 
matic talk of Cato, the maxim that " a man should farm 

* " The ivliole Arte of Husbandry, first written by Conrade Heres- 
batch, and translated by Baniabj' Googe, Eequire; " Book I. 



8 WET DAYS. 

no more land than he can farm well," and that other, 
" that a fanner should be a seller rather than a buyer," 
Mr. McManus (the foreman) brings his brown fist 
down with an authoritative rap upon the table that lies 
between us, and says, — " That 's sense ! " 

In short, the shrewd sagacity, the keen worldly pru- 
dence, which I observe to lie at the root of all the 
farming thrift around me, I detect in a hundred 
bristling paragraphs of the Latin masters whose pages 
are before me. 

" Sell your old cattle and your good-for-nothing 
sheep," * says Cato ; and, true to the preachment, some 
thrifty man of an adjoining town tries to pass upon me a 
toothless cow or a spavined horse. " Establish your fai-ra 
near to market, or adjoining good roads," f says the Ro- 
man, and thereupon the New-Englander pounces down 
in his two-story white house upon the very edge of the 
highway. And not alone in these lesser matters, but 
in all that relates to husbandry, I take a curious interest 
in following up the traces of cousinship between the 
old and the new votaries of the craft ; and believing 
that I may find for a few wet days of talk, a little parish 
of country livers who have a kindred interest, I propose 
in this book to review the suggestions and drift of the 

* " Vendat boves vetulos .... oves rejiculas [and the old heathen 
scoundrel continues] sei-vum senem, servura morbosum." 
t "Oppidum validum prop^ siet .... aut via bona." 



WITHOUT AND WITHIN. 9 

various agncultural writers, beginning with the Greeks, 
and coming down to a jjeriod within the memory of 
those who are living. I shall also take the liberty of 
relieving the talk with mention of those pastoral 
writers who have thrown some light upon the rural 
life of their days, or who by a truthfulness and sim- 
plicity of touch have made their volumes welcome ones 
upon the shelves of every country library. 

The books practical and poetical which relate to 
flower and field, stand wedded on my shelves and 
wedded in my thought. In the text of Xenophon I 
see the ridges piling along the ^lian fields, and in the 
music of Theocritus I hear a lark that hangs hover- 
ing over the straight-laid furrows. An elegy of Tibul- 
lus peoples with lovers a farmstead that Columella de- 
scribes. The sparrows of Guarini twitter up and down 
along the steps of Crescenzi's terraced gardens. Hugh 
Piatt dabbles a wheat-lot, and Spenser spangles it 
with dew. Tull drives his horse-hoe a-field where 
Thompson wakes a chorus of voices, and flings the dap- 
pling shadows of clouds. 

Wliy divorce these twin-workei's towards the profits 
and the entertainment of a rural life ? Nature has sol- 
emnized the marriage of the beautiful with the practical 
by touching some day, sooner or later, every lifting 
harvest with a bridal sheen of blossoms ; no clover- 
crop is perfect without its bloom, and no pasture hill- 



10 WET DAYS. 

side altogether what Providence intended it should be, 
until the May sun has come and stamped it over with 
its fiery brand of dandelions. 



Hesiod and Homer. 

TTESIOD is currently reckoned one of the oldest 
-^-^ fanu - writers ; but there is not enough in his 
homely poem (" Yf orks and Days ") out of which to 
conjure a farm-system. He gives good advice, indeed, 
about the weather, about ploughing when the ground is 
not too wet, about the proper timber to put to a plough- 
beam, about building a house, and taking a bride. He 
also commends the felling of wood in autumn, — a 
suggestion in which most lumbermen will concur with 
him, although it is questionable if sounder timber is 
not secured by cutting before the falling of the leaves. 

" When the tall forest sheds her foliage round, 
And with autumnal verdure strews the ground, 
The bole is incorrupt, the timber good, — 
Then whet the sounding ax to fell the wood." * 

The old Greek expresses a little doubt of young folk. 

" Let a good ploughman yeared to forty, drive : 
And see the careful husbandman be fed 
With plenteous morsels, and of wholesome bread : 

* Cooke's Hesicd; Book II. 



HESIOD AND HOMER. 11 

The slave who numbers fewer days, you 'II lind 
Ciireless of work and of a rambling mind." 

He is not true to moderu notions of the creature 
comforts in advising (Book II. line 244) that the oxen 
be stinted of their fodder in winter, and still less in his 
suggestion (line 285) that three parts of water should 
be added to the Biblian wine. 

Mr. Gladstone notes the fact that Homer talks only 
in a grandiose way of rural life and employments, as if 
there were no small landholders in his day ; but Hesiod, 
who must have lived within a century of Homer, with 
his modest homeliness, does not confirm this view. He 
tells us a farmer should keep two ploughs, and be cau- 
tious how he lends either of them. His household stip- 
ulations, too, are most moderate, whether on the score 
of the bride, the maid, or the "forty-year-old" plough- 
man ; and for guardianship of the premises the pro- 
prietor is recommended to keep " a sharp-toothed cur." 

This reminds us how Ulysses, on his return from 
voyaging, found seated round his good bailiff Emnaeus 
four savage watch -dogs, who straightway (and here 
Homer must have nodded) attack their old master, 
and are driven off only by a good pelting of stones. 

This Eumasus may be regarded as the Homeric 
representative famier, as well as bailiff and swine- 
herd, — the great original of Gurth, who might have 
prepared a supper for Cedric the Saxon very much as 



12 WET DAYS. 

Eumaeus extemporized one upon his Greek farm for 
Ulysses. Pope shall tell of this bit of cookery in rhyme 
that has a ring of the Rappahannock : — 

" His vest succinct then girding round his waist, 
Forth rushed the swain with hospitable haste, 
Straight to the lodgments of his herd he run. 
Where the fat porkers slept beneath the sun ; 
Of two his cutlass launched the spouting blood ; 
These quartered, singed, and fixed on forks of wood, 
All hasty on the hissing coals he threw ; 
And, smoking, back the tasteful viands drew, 
Broachers, and all." 

This is roast pig : nothing more elegant or digestible. 
For the credit of Greek farmers, I am sorry that 
Eumaeus had nothing better to offer his landlord, — 
the most abominable dish, Charles Lamb and his 
pleasant fable to the contrary notwithstanding, that 
was ever set before a Christian. 

But there is pleasanter and more odorous scent of 
the Homeric country in the poet's flowing description 
of the garden of Alcinous ; and thither, on this wet 
day, I conduct my reader, under leave of the King 
of the Phaeacians : — 

" Four acres was the allotted space of ground, 
Fenced with a green enclosure all around, 
Tall thriving trees confined the fruitful mould; 
The reddening apple ripens here to gold. 
Here the blue fig with luscious juice o'erflows, 
With deeper red the full pomegranate glows ; 



IIESIOD AND HOMER. 13 

The branch here bends beneath the weighty pear, 
Anc" verdant olives flourish round the year. 
The balmy spirit of the western gale 
Eternal breathes on fruits untaught to fail: 
Each dropping pear a following pear supplies ; 
On apples apples, figs on figs arise : 
The same mild season gives the blooms to blow. 
The buds to harden and the fruits to grow- 

" Here ordered vines in equal ranks appear. 
With all th' imited labors of the year ; 
Some to unload the fertile branches run, 
Some dry the blackening clusters in the sun ; 
Others to tread the liquid harvest join, 
The groaning presses foam with floods of wine. 
Here are the vines in early flowere descried, 
Here grapes discolored on the sunny side, 
And there in autumn's richest purple dyed." 

Is this not a pretty garden-scene for a blind poet to 
lay down ? Horace Walpole, indeed, in an ill-natured 
way, tells us,* that, " divested of harmonious Greek and 
bewitching poetry," it was but a small orchard and vine- 
yard, with some beds of herbs and two fountains that 
watered them, enclosed by a thick-set hedge. I do not 
thank him for the observation ; I prefer to regard the 
four acres of Alcinous with all the Homeric bigness 
and glow upon them. And under the same old Greek 
haze I see the majestic Ulysses, in his tattered clothes 
flinging back the taunts of the trifling Eurymachus, 
• Lord Orford's Works, 1793; Vol ''.p. 520. 



14 WET DAYS. 

and in the spirit of a yeoman who knew how to htindle 
a plough as well as a speai*, boasting after this style : — 

" Should v/e, O Prince, engage 
In rival tasks beneath the burning rage 
Of summer suns ; were both constrained to wield, 
Foodless, the scythe along the burdened field; 
Or should we labor, while the ploughshare wounds, 
With steers of equal strength, the allotted groimds ; 
Beneath my labors, how thy wondering eyes 
Might see the sable field at once arise !" 

To return to Hesiod, we suspect that he was only a 
small farmer — if he had ever farmed at all — in the 
foggy latitude of Boeotia, and knew nothing of the sunny 
wealth in the south of the peninsula, or of such princely 
estates as Eiunaeus managed in the Ionian Seas. Flax- 
man has certainly not given him the look of a large 
proprietor in his outlines : his toilet is severely scant, 
and the old gentleman appears to have lost two of his 
fingers in a chaff-cutter. As for Perses, who is rep- 
resented as listening to the sage,* his dress is in the 
extreme of classic scantiness, — being, in fact, a mere 
night-shirt, and a tight fit at that. 

But we dismiss Hesiod, the first of the heathen farm- 
writers, with a loving thought of his pretty Pandora, 
whom the goddesses so bedecked, whom Jove looks on 
(in Flaxman's picture) with such sharp approval, and 
* Flaxman's Illustrations of Works and Days ; Plate I- 



XE NOP HOIST. 15 

whose attributes the poet has compacted into one res- 
onant line, daintily rendered by Cooke, — 

" Thus the sex began 
A lovelv mischief to the soul of man." 



Xeyiophon. 

~r NEXT beg to pull from his place upon the shelf, 
-*- and to present to the reader, General Xenophon, 
a most graceful writer, a capital huntsman, an able 
strategist, an experienced farmer, and, if we may be- 
lieve Laertius, "handsome beyond expi-ession." 

It is refreshing to find such qualities united in one 
man at any time, and doubly refreshing to find them in 
a person so far removed from the charities of to-day 
that the malcontents cannot pull his character in pieces. 
To be sure, he was guilty of a fev/ acts of pillage in the 
course of his Persian campaign, but he tells the story 
of it in his " Anabasis " with a brave front ; his purse 
was low, and needed replenishment ; there is no cover 
put up, of disorderly sutlers or camp-followers. 

The firming reputation of the general rests upon 
his " CEconomics " and his horse-treatise ('Ittttikt/). 

Economy has come to have a contorted meaning in 
our day, as if it were only — saving. Its ti'ue gist is 
better expressed by the word mayiagemcnt ; and in that 
old-fashioned sense it forms a significant title for Xen- 



16 WET DAYS. 

ophon's book : management of the household, manage- 
ment of flocks, of servants, of land, and of property in 
general. 

At the very outset we find this bit of practical wis- 
dom, which is put into the mouth of Socrates, who is 
replying to Critobulus : — " Those things should be 
called goods that are beneficial to the master. Neither 
can those lands be called goods which by a man's un- 
skilful management jjut him to more expense than he 
receives profit by them ; nor may those lands be called 
goods which do not bring a good farmer such a profit 
as may give him a good living." 

Thereafter (sec. vii.) he introduces the good Ischora- 
achus, who, it appears, has a thrifty wife at home, and 
from that source flow in a great many capital hints upon 
domestic management. The apartments, the exposure, 
the cleanliness, the order, are all considered in such an 
admirably practical, common-sense way as would make 
the old Greek a good lecturer to the sewing-circles of 
our time. And when the wife of the wise Ischomachus, 
in an unfortunate moment, puts on rouge and cosmetics, 
the grave husband meets her with this complimentary 
rebuke : — " Can there be anything in Nature more 
complete than yourself? " 

" The science of husbandry," he says, and it might 
be said of the science in most times, " is extremely prof- 
itable to those who understand it ; but it brings the 



XE NOP HON. 17 

greatest trouble and misery upon those farmers who 
undertake it without knowledge." (sec. xv.) 

Where Xenophon comes to speak of the details of 
fann-labor, of ploughings and fallowings, there is all 
that precision and particularity of mention, added to a 
shrewd sagacity, which one might look for in the col- 
umns of the " Country Gentleman." He even describes 
how a field should be throAvn into narrow lands, in 
order to promote a more effectual surface-drainage. In 
the midst of it, however, we come upon a stercorary 
maxim, which is, to say the least, of doubtful worth : — 
" Nor is there any sort of earth which will not make 
very rich manure, by being laid a due time in standing 
water, till it is fully impregnated witla the virtue of the 
water." One of his British translators. Professor Brad- 
ley, does, indeed, give a little note of corroborative 
testimony. But I would not advise any active farmer, 
on the authority either of General Xenophon or of 
Professor Bradley, to transport his surface-soil very 
largely to the nearest frog-pond, in the hope of finding 
it transmuted into manure. The absorptive and reten- 
tive capacity of soils is, to be sure, the bone just now 
of very particular contention ; but whatever that ca- 
pacity may be, it certainly needs something more pal- 
pable than the virtue of standing water for its profita- 
ble development. 

Here, again, is very neat evidence of how much 
2 



18 WET DAYS. 

sim^jle good sense has to do with husbandry : Socrates, 
who is sup2)0sed to have no particular knowledge of the 
craft, says to his interlocutor, — " You have satisfied me 
that lam not ignorant in husbandry; and yet I never 
had any master to instruct me in it." 

" It is not," says Xenophon, '' difference in knowledge 
or opportunities of knowledge that makes some fanners 
rich and others poor ; but that which makes some poor 
and some rich is that the former are negligent and lazy, 
the latter industrious and thrifty." 

Next, we have this masculine e7'go : — " Therefore we 
may know that those wlio will not learn such sciences 
as they might get their living by, or do not fall into 
husbandry, are either dov/nright fools, or else propose 
to get their living by robbery or by begging." (sec. xx.) 

This is a good clean cut at politicians, office-holders, 
and other such beggar-craft, through more than a score 
of centuries, — clean as classicism can make it : the 
Attic euphony in it, and all the aroma of age. 

Once more, and it is the last of the " CEconomicus," 
we give this charming bit of New-Englandism : — "I 
remember my father had an excellent rule," {Ischoma- 
chus loquitur,) " which he advised me to follow : that, 
if ever I bought any land, I should by no means pxu'- 
chase that which had been already well-improved, but 
should choose such as had never been tilled, either 
through neglect of the owner, or for want of capacity 



XE NOP HON. 15 

to do it ; for he observed, that, if I were to purchase 
improved grounds, I must pay a high price for them, 
and tlien I could not propose to advance their vahie, 
and must also lose the pleasure of improving them 
myself, or of seeing them thrive better by my en- 
deavors." * 

When Xenoi^hon wrote his rural treatises, (including 
the KvvqyerLKO';,) he was living in that delightful region 
of countiy which lies westward of the mountains of 
Arcadia, looking toward the Ionian Sea. Here, too, 
he wrote the story of his retreat, and his wanderings 
among the mountains of Armenia ; here he talked with 
his friends, and made other such symposia as he has 
given us a taste of at the house of Callias the Athenian ; 
here he ranged over the whole country-side with his 
Iiorses and dogs : a stalwart and lithe old gentleman, 
without a doubt ; able to mount a horse or to manage 
one, v.ith the supplest of the grooms ; and with a keen 
eye, as his book shows, for the good points in horse- 
flesh. A man might make a worse mistake than to 
buy a horse after Xenophon's instructions, to-day. A 
spavin or a wind-gall did not escape the old gentleman's 
eye, and he never bought a nag without proving his 
wind, and handling him Avell about tlie mouth and ears. 

* It is worthy of note that Cato advises a contrary practice, and 
urges that purchase of land be made of a good farmer. " Caveto ne 
alienam disciplinam temere coiitemnas. Pe domino bono colono, bono- 
que icdificatorc melias emetur." — Dk Re Ritsiica, I. 



20 WET DAYS. 

His grooms were taught their duties with nice special- 
ity : the mane and tail to be thoroughly v/ashed ; the 
food and bed to be properly and regularly prepared ; 
and treatment to be always gentle and kind. 

Exception may perhaps be taken to his doctrine in 
regard to stall-floors. Moist ones, he says, injure the 
hoof: "Better to have stones inserted in the ground 
close to one another, equal in size to their hoofs ; for 
such stalls consolidate the hoofs of those standing on 
them, beside strengthening the hollow of the foot." 

After certain directions for rough riding and leaping, 
he advises hunting through thickets, if Avild animals are 
to be found. Otherwise, the following pleasant diver- 
sion is named, which I beg to suggest to sub-lieutenants 
in training for dragoon-service : — "It is a useful ex- 
ercise for two horsemen to agree between themselves, 
that one shall retire through all sorts of rough places, 
and as he flees, is to turn about from time to time and 
present his spear ; and the other shall pursue, having 
javelins bhmted with balls, and a spear of the same 
description, and whenever he comes within javelin- 
throw, he is to hurl the blunted weapon at the party 
retreating, and whenever he comes within spear-reach, 
he is to strike him with it," 

Putting aside his horsemanship, in which he must 
have been nearly perfect, there was very much that was 
grand about the old Greek, — very much that makes us 



THEOCRITUS AND LESSER POETS. 21 

strangely love the man, who, v/hen his soldiers lay be- 
numbed under the snov/s on the heights of Amienia, 
threw off his general's coat, or blanket, or what not, 
and set himself resolutely to wood-chopping and to 
cheering them. The farmer knew how. Such men win 
battles. He has his joke, too, with Cheirisophus, the 
Lacedaemonian, about the thieving propensity of his 
townspeople, and invites him, in virtue of it, to steal a 
difficult march upon the enemy. And Cheirisophus 
grimly retorts upon Xenophon, that Athenians are said 
to be great experts in stealing the public money, espe- 
cially the high officers. This sounds home-like ! When 
I come upon such things, — by Jupiter ! — I forget the 
parasangs and the Taochians and the dead Cyrus, and 
seem to be reading out of American newspapers. 

Theocritus and Lesser Poets. 

"TT is quite out of the question to claim Theocritus as 
-*- a farm-writer ; and yet in all old literature there is 
not to be found such a lively bevy of heifers, and wan- 
ton kids, and " butting rams," and stalwart herdsmen, 
who milk the cows " upon the sly," as in the " Idyls " of 
the musical Sicilian. 

There is no doubt but Theocritus knew the country 
to a charm : he knew all its roughnesses, and the thorns 
that scratched the bare legs of the goatherds; he 



22 WET DAYS. 

knew the lank heifers, that fed, " like grasshoppers," 
only on dew ; he knew what clatter the brooks made, 
tumbling headlong adown the rocks ; * he knew, more- 
over, all the charms and coyness of the country- 
nymphs, giving even a rural twist to his praises of the 
courtly Helen : — 

" In shape, in height, in stately presence fair, 
Straight as a furrow gliding from the share." f 

A man must have had an eye for good ploughing and 
a lithe figure, as well as a keen scent for the odor of 
fresh-turned earth, to make such a comparison as that ! 

Again, he gives us an Idyl of the Reapers. Milo and 
Battus are afield together. The last lags at his work, 
and Milo twits him with his laziness ; whereupon Battus 
retorts, — 

" Milo, thou moiling drudge, as hard as stone, 
An absent mistress^ did'st thou ne'er bemoan? '' 

And Milo, — 

" Not I, — I never learnt fair maids to woo ; 
Pray, what with love have reaping men to do ? " 

Yet he listens to the plaint of his brother-reaper, and 
draws him out in praise of his mistress — " charming 

* The resomiding clatter of his fallmg water is too beautiful to be 
omitted: — 

— urcd rue ~iTpac KaTaXeijSerac vipo^dsv v6u}p- 

•f Elton's translation, I think. I do not vouch for its correctness. 



THEOCRITUS AND LESSER POETS. 23 

Bombyce," — upon which love-lorn strain Milo breaks 
in, rough and homely and breezy : — 

" My Battus, witless witli a beard so long, 
Attend to tuneful Lytierses' song. 
O fruitful Ceres, bless with corn the field; 
May the full ears a plenteous harvest yield ! 
Bind, reapers, bind your sheaves, lest strangers say, 
' Ah, lazy drones, their hire is thrown away ! ' 
To the fresh north wind or the zephjTS reai' 
Your shocks of corn ; those breezes fill the ear. 
Ye threshers, never sleep at noon of day. 
For then the light chaff quickly blows away. 
Reapers should rise with larks to earn their hire, 
Rest in the heat, and with the larks retire. 
How happy is the fortune of a frog : 
He wants no moisture in his wateiy bog. 
Steward, boil all the pease : such pinching 's mean ; 
You '11 cut your hand by splitting of a bean." 

Theocritus was no French sentimentalist ; he would 
have protested against the tame elegancies of the Eo- 
nian Bucolics ; and the sospiri ardenti and miserelli 
amanti of Guarini would have driven him mad. He is as 
brisk as the wind upon a breezy down. His cow-tenders 
are swart and barelegged, and love with a vengeance. 
It is no Boucher we have here, nor Watteau : cosmetics 
and rosettes are far away ; timics are short, and cheeks 
are nut-brown. It is Teniers rather : — boors, indeed ; 
but they are live boors, and not manikin shepherds. 
There is no miserable tooting upon flutes, but an up- 



24 WET DAYS. 

roarious song that shakes the woods ; and if it comes to 
a matter of kissing, there are no " reluctant lips," but a 
smack that makes the vales resound. 

I shall call out another Sicilian here, named Mos- 
chus, were it only for his picture of a fine, sturdy bul- 
lock : it occurs in his " Rape of Europa " : — 

" With yellow hue his sleekened body beams ; 
His forehead with a snowy circle gleams ; 
Horns, equal-bending, from his brow emerge, 
And to a moonlight crescent orbing verge." 

Nothing can be finer than the way in which this 
" milky steer," with Europa on his back, goes sailing 
over the brine, his " feet all oars." Meantime, she, the 
pretty truant, 

" Grasps with one hand his curved projecting horn, 
And with the other closely di-awn compressed 
The fluttering foldings of her purple vest, 
Whene'er its fringed hem was dashed with dew 
Of the salt sea-foam that in circles flew: 
Wide o'er Europa's shoulders to the gale 
The ruffled robe heaved swelling, like a sail." 

Moschus is as rich as the Veronese at Venice ; and 
his picture is truer to the premium standard. The 
painting shows a pampered animal, with over-red 
blotches on his white hide, and is by half too fat to 
breast such " salt sea-foam " as flashes on the Idyl of 
Moschus. 



THEOCRITUS AND LESSER POETS. 25 

Another poet, Aratus of Cilicia, whose very name 
has a smack of tillage, has left us a book about the 
weather (Atoo-rj/xcta) which is quite as good to mark 
down a hay-day by as the later meteorologies of Pro- 
fessor Espy or Judge Butler. 

Besides wliich, our friend Aratus holds the abiding 
honor of having been quoted by St. Paul, in his speech 
to the Athenians on Mars Hill : — 

" For in Him Ave live, and move, and have our being ; 
as certain also of your own poets have said : ' For we 
are also His offspring.' " 

And Aratus, (after Elton,) — 

" On thee our being hangs ; in thee we move ; 
All are thy offspring, and the seed of Jove." 

Scattered through the lesser Greek poets, and up 
and down the Anthology, are charming bits of rurality, 
redolent of the fields and of field-life, with which it 
would be easy to fill up the measure of this rainy day, 
and beat off the Grecian couplets to the tinkle of the 
eave-drops. Up and down, the cicada chirps ; the 
locust, " encourager of sleep," sings his drowsy song ; 
boozy Anacreon flings grapes ; the purple violets and 
the daffodils crown the perfumed head of Heliodora ; 
and the reverent Simonides likens our life to the grass. 

Nor will I part company with these, or close up the 
Greek ranks of fanners, (in which I must not forget 
the great schoolmaster, Theophrastus,) until I cull a 



26 WET DAYS. 

sample of the Anthology, and plant it foi* a guidon at 
the head of the column, — a little bannerol of music, 
touching upon our topic, as daintily as the bees touch 
the flowering tips of the wild thyme. 
It is by Zonas the Sardian : — 

At d' ayere ^ovdai atixj3?i,ifcdeg unpa /liXcaaai, 

K. T. /I., — 

and the rendering by Mr. Hay : — 

" Ye nimble honej'-making bees, the flowers are in their prime ; 
Come now and taste the little buds of sweetly breathing thyme, 
Of tender poppies all so fair, or bits of raisin sweet, 
Or down that decks the apple tribe, or fragrant violet; 
Come, nibble on, — your vessels store with honey while you can, 
In order that the hive-protecting, bee-presen'ing Pan 
May have a tasting for himself, and that the hand so rude. 
That cuts away the comb, maj' leave yom-selves some little food." 

Cato. 

LEAVING now this murmur of the bees upon the 
banks of the Pactolus, we will slip over-seas to 
Tusculum, where Cato was born, who was the oldest of 
the Roman writers upon agriculture ; and thence into 
the Sabine territory, where, upon an estate of his father's, 
in the midst of the beautiful country lying northward 
of the Monte Gennaro, (the Lucretilis of Horace,) he 
learned the art of good farming. 

In what this art consisted in his day, he tells us in 
short, crackling speech : — '■^Primum, bene arare ; se- 



CATO. 27 

cundum, arai'e ; tertium, stercorare." For the rest, he 
says, choose good seed, sow thickly, and pull all the 
weeds. Nothing more would be needed to grow as 
good a crop upon the checkered plateau under my win- 
dow as ever fattened among the Sabine Hills. 

Has the art come to a stand-still, then ; and shall we 
take to reading Cato on fair days, as well as rainy ? 

There has been advance, without doubt ; but all the 
advance in the world would not take away the edge 
from truths, stated as Cato knew hoAv to state them. 
There is very much of what is called Agricultural 
Science, nowadays, which is — rubbish. Science is 
sound, and agriculture always an honest art ; but the 
mixture, not uncommonly, is bad, — no fair marriage, 
but a monstrous concubinage, with a monstrous progeny 
of muddy treatises and disquisitions which confuse more 
than they instruct. In contrast with such, it is no won- 
der that the observations of such a man as Cato, whose 
energies had been kept alive by service in the field, 
and whose tongue had been educated in the Roman 
Senate, should carry weight with them. The grand 
truths on which successful agriculture rests, and which 
simple experience long ago demonstrated, cannot be 
kept out of view, nor can they be dwarfed by any im- 
position of learning. ^ Science may explain them, or 
illustrate or extend; but it cannot shake their j^re- 
ponderating influence upon the crop of the year. As 



28 WET DAYS. 

respects many other arts, the initial truths may be lost 
sight of, and overlaid by the mass of succeeding devel- 
opments, — not falsified, but so belittled as practically 
to be counted for nothing. In this respect, agriculture 
is exceptional. The old story is always the safe story : 
you must plough and plough again ; and manure ; and 
sow good seed, and enough ; and pull the weeds ; and 
as sure as the rain falls, the crop will come. 

Many nice additions to this method of treatment, 
which my fine-farming friends will suggest, are antici- 
pated by the old Roman, if we look far enough into his 
book. Thus, he knew the uses of a harrow ; he knew 
the wisdom of ploughing in a green crop ; he had 
steeps for his seed; he knew how to drain off the 
surface-water, — nay, there is very much in his account 
of the proper preparation of ground for olive-trees, or 
vine-setting, which looks like a mastery of the princi- 
ples that govern the modern system of drainage.* 

Of what particular service recent investigations in 
science have been to the practical farmer, and what 
positive and available aid, beyond what could be de- 
rived from a careful study of the Roman masters, they 
put into the hands of an intelligent worker, who is till- 
ing ground simply for pecuniary advantage, I shall hope 
to inquire and discourse upon some other day : when 
that day comes, we will fling out the banner of the 
* XLIII. " Suleos, si locus aquosus erit, alveatos esse oportet," etc. 



CATO. 29 

nineteenth century, and give a gun to Liebig, and John- 
son, and the rest. 

Meantime, as a farmer who endeavors to keep posted 
in all the devices for pushing lands which have an awk- 
ward habit of yielchng poor crops into the better habit 
of yielding large ones, I will not attempt to conceal the 
chagrin with which I find this curmudgeon of a Roman 
Senator, living two centuries before Christ, and north- 
ward of Monte Gennaro, who never heard of " Hovey's 
Root-Cutter," or of the law of primaries, laying down 
rules * of culture so clear, so apt, so full, that I, who 
have the advantages of two thousand years, find nothing 
in them to laugh at, unless it be a few oblations to 
the gods ; t and this, considering that I am just now 
burning a little incense (Havana) to the nymph Volutia, 
is uncalled for. 

And if Senator Cato were to wake up to-morrow, in 
the white house that stares through the rain yonder, 
and were to open his little musty vellum of slipshod 
maxims, and, in faith of it, start a rival farm in the 
bean-line, or in vine-growing, — keeping clear of the 
newspapers, — I make no doubt but he would prove 
as thrifty a neighbor as my good friend the Deacon. 

We nineteenth-century men, at work among our 

cabbages, clipping off the purslane and the twitch-grass, 

* This mention, of course, excludes the Senator's formulce for un- 
guents, aperients, cattle-nostrums, and pickled pork, 
t CXXXIV. Cato, De Re Rusiicd. 



80 WET DAYS. . • 

are disposed to assume a very complacent attitude, as 
we lean upon our lioe-handles, — as if we were doing 
tall things in the way of illustrating physiology and the 
cognate sciences. But the truth is, old Laertes, near 
three thousand years ago, in his slouch cap and greasy 
beard, was hoeing up in the same way his purslane and 
twitch-grass, in his bean-patch on the hills of Ithaca. 
The difference between us, so far as the crop and the 
tools go, is, after all, ignominiously small. He dreaded 
the weevil in his beans, and we the club-foot in our cab- 
bages ; we have the " Herald," and he had none ; we 
have " Plantation-Bitters," and he had his jug of the 
Biblian wine. 

Varro. 
VARRO, another Roman farmer, lies between the 
• same covers " De Re Rustica" with Cato, and 
seems to have had more literary tact, though less of 
blmit sagacity. Yet he challenges at once our confi- 
dence by telling us so frankly the occasion of his writ- 
ing upon such a subject. Life, he says, is a bubble, — 
and the life of an old man a bubble about to break. He 
is eighty, and must pack his luggage to go out of this 
world. (^'Antitcs octogesirmis admonet me, ut sarcinas 
colligam antequam proficlscar e vita") Therefore he 
writes down for his wife, Fundania, the rules by which 
she may manage the farm. 



VARRO. 81 

And a very respectably old lady she must have been, 
to deal with the villici and the coloni, if her age bore 
suitable relation to that of her husband. The ripe 
maturity of many of the rural writers I have introduced 
cannot fail to arrest attention. Thus, Xenophon gained 
a strength in his ^lian fields that carried him into the 
nineties ; Cato lived to be over eighty ; and now we 
have Varro, writing his book out by Tusculmn at the 
same age, and surviving to counsel with Fundania ten 
years more. Pliny, too, (the elder,) who, if not a farmer, 
had his country-seats, and left very much to establish 
our acquaintance with the Roman rural life, was a hale, 
much-enduring man, of such soldierly habits and large 
abstemiousness as to warrant a good fourscore, — if he 
had not fallen under that murderous cloud of ashes 
from Mount Vesuvius, in the year 79. 

The poets, doubtless, burnt out earlier, as they usually 
do. Virgil, whom I shall come to speak of presently, 
certainly did: he died at fifty-one. Tibullus, whose 
opening Idyl is as pretty a bit of gasconade about living 
in a cottage in the country, upon love and a few vege- 
tables, as a maiden could wish for, did not reach the 
fifties ; and Martial, whose " Faustine Villa," if noth- 
ing else, entitles him to rural oblation, fell short of the 
sixties. Varro himself alludes with pride to the greater 
longevity of those who live in the country, and alleges 
as a reason, " quod Divina natura dedit agros, ars 



82 WET DAYS. 

humana cedificavit urhes." Is not this the possible 
original of Cowper's " God made the country, and man 
made the town "? 

The old man is very full in his rules for Fundania, 
not only as regards general management, but in respect 
to the choice of land, the determination of its quali- 
ties, the building of the country-houses, the arrange- 
ment of the offices, the regimen of the servants, and 
the treatment of the various manures and crops. He 
clearly urges rotation, has faith in a very large in- 
fluence of the moon, coimts the droppings of pigeons 
the best of all manures, and gives the sea-birds very 
little credit for their contributions to the same office.* 
I even find this octogenarian waxing jocose at times. 
On a certain occasion he says, (it is mentioned in his 
book of poultry and birds,t) " I paid a visit with a 
friend to Appius Claudius, the Augur, and found him 
seated, with Cornelius Merula [blackbird] and Fircel- 
lius Pavo [peacock] on his left, while Minutius Pica 
[magpie] and Petronius Passer [sparrow] were on his 
right ; whereupon my friend says, ' My good sir, you 
receive us in your aviary, seated among your birds.'" 
The jokelet is not indeed over-racy, but it has a quaint 
twang, coming as it does in musty type over so many 
centuries, from the pen of an old man of eighty, who 

* Lib. I. cap. xxxviii. " Stercus optimum scribit Cassius esse volu- 
crum, prfeter paJustrium, ac nantium." 
t Lib. III. cap. ii. De Re Ruslica. 



COLUMELLA. 33 

discussed guinea-fowl and geese, and who made morn- 
ing calls at the house of Judge Appius Claudius. 

Varro indulges in some sharp sneers at those who 
had written on the same subject before him. This was 
natural enough in a man of his pursuits : he had writ- 
ten four hundred books. 

Columella. 

/~\F Columella we know scarcely more than that he 
^-^ lived somewhere about the time of Tiberius, that 
he was a man of wealth, that he travelled extensively 
through* Gaul, Italy, and Greece, observing intelligently 
different methods of culture, and that he has given the 
fullest existing compend of ancient agriculture. In his 
chapter upon Gardening he warms into hexameters ; 
but the rest is stately and euphonious pi-ose. In his 
opening chapter, he does not forego such praises of the 
farmer's life as sound like a lawyer's address before a 
county - society on a fair -day. Cincinnatus and his 
plough come in for it ; and Fabricius and Curius Den- 
tatus ; with which names, luckily, our orators cannot 
whet their periods, since Columella's mention of them 
is about all we know of their farming. 

He falls into the way, moreover, of lamenting, as 
people obstinately continue to do, the " good old times," 
when men were better than " now," and when the rea- 
sonable delights of the garden and the fields engrossed 



34 WET DAYS. 

them to the neglect of the circus and the theatres. 
But when he opens upon his subject proper, it is in 
grandiose Spanish style, (he was a native of Cadiz,) 
with a maxim broad enough to cover all possible condi- 
tions : — " Whoever would devote himself to the pursuit 
of agriculture should understand that he must summon 
to his aid — prudence in business, a faculty of spend- 
ing, and a determination to work." * Oi , as Tremellius 
says, — " That man will master the craft, who knows 
how to cultivate, et poterit, et volet." 

This is comprehensive, if not encouraging. It would 
be hard to say, indeed, in what particular this summa- 
tion of Columella would not apply to the pursuit of 
almost any man. That " faculty of spending " is a tre- 
mendous bolster to a great many other things as well 
as farming. Neither parsons nor politicians can ignore 
it wholly. It is only another shape of the poterit, and 
the poterit only a scholarly rendering of pounds and 
pence. As if Tremellius had said, — That man will 
make his way at farming who understands the business, 
who has the money to apply to it, and who is willing to 
bleed freely. There are a great many people who have 
said the same thing since. 

With a kindred sagacity this shrewd Roman advises 
a man to slip upon his farm often, in order that his stew- 

* "Qui studium agricolationi dederit, sciat hxc sibi advocanda; 
prudentiam rei, facultatem impendendi, voluntatem agendi." 



COLUMELLA. 35 

ard may keep sharply at his work ; he even suggests 
that the landlord make a feint of coming, when he has 
no intention thereto, that he may gain a day's alertness 
from the bailiff. The book is of course a measure of 
the advances made in farming during the two hundred 
years elapsed since Cato's time ; but those advances 
were not great. There was advance in power to sys- 
tematize facts, advance in literary aptitude, but no very 
noticeable gain in methods of culture. Columella gives 
the results of wider observation, and of more persistent 
study ; but, for aught I can see, a man could get a crop 
of lentils as well with Cato as with Colmnella ; a man 
would house his flocks and servants as well out of the 
one as the other ; in short, a man would grow into the 
" faculty of spending " as swiftly under the teachings 
of the Senator as of the later writer of the reign of 
Tiberius. 

It is to be observed, however, that, so far as one can 
judge from the work of Columella, farming was now 
conducted upon a grander scale. The days when Cin- 
cinnatus dug among his own cabbages, and Curius 
Dentatus bent his own back to the sarculum, were long 
gone by, and were looked back upon, I dare say, by the 
first readers of the elegant Columella, as we look back 
to the days of Captain Smith, Pocahontas, and corn-cakes 
baked in the ashes. The details of a Roman farmery 
which are entered upon by this author are of an extent 
and of a nicety which would compare with an East- 



36 



WET DAYS. 



Lothian steading. He divides the entire establishment 
into three distinct parts : the villa urbana, the villa riis- 
tica, and the fructuaria ; or, as we might say, the man- 
sion-house, the laborers' cottages, and the out-buildings. 
I give a reduced drawing of such a design from 
Castell's " Villas of the Ancients." * A huge kitchen, it 

* The following letters and numbers indicate the several parts : — 
A. The Villa Urbana. 

a. Inner court. h. Servants' hall. 

b. Summer dining-room. i. Dressing-room of baths. 

c. Winter dining-room. Ic. Bathing-room. 

d. Withdrawing-rooms. /. Warm cell. 

e. Winter apartments. m. Sweating-room. 
f. Summer apartments. n. Furnace. 

g. Libraiy. o. Porters' lodges. 

B. Villa Rustica and Fructuaria. 



1. Inner farm-yard. 


23. Sheepfold. 


2. Pond. 


24. Shepherds. 


3. Outer yard. 


25. Goat-pens. 


4. Kitchen. 


26. Goatherds. 


5. New wine. 


27. Dog-kennels. 


6. Old wine. 


28. Cart-houses. 


7. Housekeeper. 


29. Hog-sties. 


8. Spinning-room. 


30. Hog-keepers. 


9. To sick-room. 


31. Bakehouse. 


10. Lodges. 


32. Mill. 


11. Stairs to bailiff's room. 


33. Outer pond. 


12. Keeper of stoves. 


34. Dunghills. 


13. Stairs to work-house. 


35. Wood and fodder. 


14. Wine-press. 


36. Hen-yard. 


15. Oil-press. 


37, 38. Dove-houses. 


16. Granaries. 


39. Thnishes. 


17. Fruit-room. 


40. Poultry. 


18. Master of cattle. 


41. Poulterers. 


19. Ox-stalls. 


42. Porter. 


20. Herdsmen. 


43. Dog-kennels. 


21. Stables. 


44. Orchard. 


22. Grooms. 


45. Kitchen-garden 



COLUMELLA. 



37 




A I ^ bPFFT \o\-r\'L\ ^ I 







A ROMAN FARMERY. 



38 WET DAYS. 

will be seen, forms a prominent feature of the " rustic " 
part of the establishment, and opening directly upon 
the kitchen are the ox-stalls. Behind these is a court 
flanked by the herdsmen's quartei's, and by the wine- 
cellars ; and still farther in the rear, a larger court 
with goat-pens, cells for the goatherds, and kennels 
for dogs. In short, it is an establishment which would 
have amazed old Hesiod with his couplet of ploughs 
and his " sharp-toothed cur." 

Columella urges, like Cato, frequent ploughings, — 
suggesting that they be repeated until no trace of the 
furrows can be detected, by which we may infer that 
the ploughs carried but a scanty mould-board. He ad- 
vises that manures be turned under immediately after 
their application, and shows himself up to the best prac- 
tice of our time in directing that the manure-heap 
be protected from the weather. He commends the 
lucern and the cytisus, is full in the matter of all 
field-crops, and his garden-poem shows gleams of sunny 
fruit, from the apple to the pomegranate. His in- 
structions in respect of poultry are of the amplest, and, 
bating a little heathen wickedness of treatment, are bet- 
ter than the majority of poulterers could give us now. 

It is but dull work to follow all these teachings ; 
here and there I warm into a little symi)athy, as I 
catch sight, in his Latin dress, of our old friend Cur- 
cidio ; here and there I sniff a fruit that seems famil- 



A ROMAN DREAM. 39 

iar, — as the fraga., or a morum ; and here and there 
comes blushing into the crabbed text the sweet name 
of some home-flower, — a lily, a narcissus, or a rose. 
The chief value of the work of Columella, however, 
lies in its clear showing-forth of the relative importance 
given to different crops, under Roman culture, and to 
the raising of cattle, poultry, fish, etc., as compared with 
crops. Knowing this, we know very much that will 
help us toward an estimate of the domestic life of the 
Romans. We learn, with surprise, how little they re- 
garded their oxen, save as working-animals, — whether 
the milk-white steers of Clitumnus, or the dun Cam- 
panian cattle, whose descendants show their long- 
horned stateliness to this day in the Roman forimi. 
The sheep, too, whether of Tarentum or of Canusium, 
were regarded as of value chiefly for their wool and 
milk ; and it is surely amazing, that men who could 
appreciate the iambics of Horace and the eloquence of 
Cicero should have shown so little fancy for a fat 
saddle of mutton or for a mottled sirloin of beef. 



A Roman Dream. 

T CHANGE from Columella to Virgil, and from Virgil 
-*- back to some pleasant Idyl of Tibullus, and from 
Tibullus to the pretty prate of Horace about the Sa- 
bine Hills ; I stroll through Pliny's villa, eying the 



40 WET DAYS. 

clipped box-trees ; I hear the rattle in the tennis-court ; 
I watch the tall Roman girls — 

" Grandes virgines proborum colonoriim " — 

marching along with their wicker-baskets filled with 
curds and fresh-plucked thrushes, until there comes 
over me a confusion of times and places. 

— The sound of the battle of to-day dies ; the fresh 
blood-stains fade ; and I seem to wake upon the heights 
of Tusculum, in the days of Tiberius. The farm-flat 
below is a miniature Campagna, along Avhich I see 
stretching straight to the city the shining pavement of 
the Via Tusculana. The spires yonder melt into mist, 
and in place of them I see the marble house-walls of 
which Augustus boasted. As yet the grander mon- 
uments of the Empire are not built ; but there is a 
blotch of cliff which may be the Tarpeian Rock, and 
beside it a huge hulk of building on the Capitoline 
Hill, where sat the Roman Senate. A little hitherward 
are the gay turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of the 
princely houses on the Palatine Hill, and in the fore- 
ground the stately tomb of Caecilia Metella. I see the 
barriers of a hippodrome (where now howling jockeys 
make the twilight hideous) ; a gestatio, with its lines of 
trees, is before me, and the velvety lavender-green of 
olive-orchards covers the hills behind. Vines grow 
upon the slope eastward, — 



A ROMAN DREAM. 41 

" Neve tibi ad solem vergant vineta cadentem," — 

twining around, and flinging off a great wealth of ten- 
drils from their supporting-poles {pedamenta). The 
figs begin to show the purple bloom of fruitage, and the 
villiciis, who has just now come in from the atriolum, 
reports a good crop, and asks if it would not be well to 
apply a few loads of marl (tofacea) to the summer fal- 
low, which Cato is just now breaking up with the Cam- 
panian steers, for barley. 

Scipio, a stanch Numidian, has gone to market with 
three asses loaded with cabbages and asparagus. Vil- 
licus tells me that the poultry in the fattening-coops (as 
close-shut as the Strasburg geese) * are doing well, and 
he has added a soupgon of sweetening to their barley- 
gruel. The young doves have their legs faithfully bro- 
ken, (" obteras crura") and are placidly fattening on 
their stumps. The thrush-house is properly darkened, 
only enough light entering to show the food to some 
three or four thousand birds, which are in course of 
cramming for the market. The cochlearium has a good 
stock of snails and mussels ; and the little dormice are 
growing into fine conchtion for an approaching Imperial 
banquet. 

Villicus reports the clip of the Tarentine sheep un- 

* " Locus ad banc rem desideratiir maxims calidiis, et minimi lumi- 
nis, in quo singulse caveis angustioribus vel sportis inclusa; pendeant 
aves, sed ita coarctate, we versari possinty — Columella, Lib. VIII. 
cap. vii. 



42 WET DAYS. 

usually fine, and free from burrs. The nev/ must is all 
a-foam in the vinaria ; and around the inner cellar 
{gaudendem est /) there is a tier of urns, as large as 
school-boys, brimming with ripe Falernian. 

If it were not stormy, I might order out the farm- 
chariot, or curricidum, which is, after all, but a low, 
dumpy kind of horse-cart, and take a drive over the 
lava pavement of the Via Tusculana, to learn what news 
is astir, and what the citizens talk of in the forum. Is 
^ all quiet upon the Rhine ? How is it possibly with 
Germanicus? And what of that story of the arrest 
of Seneca ? It could hardly have happened, they say, 
in the good old daj^s of the Republic. 

And with this mention, as with the sound of a gun, 
the Roman pastoral dream is broken. The Campagna, 
the olive-orchards, the columharium, fall back to their 
old places in the blurred type of Columella. The Cam- 
panian steers are unyoked, and stabled in the text of 
Varro. The turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of 
the palaces of Sylla and the Caesars, give place to the 
spires of a New-England town, — southward of which 
I see through the mist a solitary flag flying over a 
soldiers' hospital. It reminds of nearer and deadlier 
perils than ever environed the Roman Republic,— 
perils out of which, if the wisdom and courage of the 
people do not find a way, some new Caesar will point it 
with the sword. 



A ROMAN DREAM. 43 

Looking northward, I see there is a bight of blue in 
the sky ; and a lee set of dark-gray and jjurple clouds 
is folding down over the eastern horizon, — against 
which the spires and the flag show clearer than ever. 
It means that the rain has stopped ; and the rain hav- 
ing stopped, my in-door work is done. 



SECOND DAY, 



Virgil. 

Q< NO WING: the checkered fields below are trace- 
^^ able now only by the brown lines of fences and 
the sparse trees that mark the hedge-rows. The white 
of the houses and of the spires of the town is seen dimly 
through the snow, and seems to waver and shift position 
like the sails and spars of ships seen through fog. And 
straightway upon this image of ships and swaying spars 
I go sailing back to the farm-land of the past, and 
sharpen my pen for another day's work among the 
old farm-writers. 

I suspect Virgil was never a serious farmer. I am 
confident he never had one of those callosities upon 
the inner side of his right thumb which come of the 
lower thole of a scythe-snath, after a week's mowing. 
But he had that quick poet's eye which sees at a 
glance what other men see only in a day. Not a shrub 
or a tree, not a bit of fallow ground or of nodding lentils 



VIRGIL. 45 

escaped his observation ; not a bird or a bee ; not even 
the mosquitoes, which to this day hover pestiferously 
about the low-lying sedge-lands of Mantua. His first 
pastoral, little known now, and rarely printed with his 
works, is inscribed Culex.* 

Young Virgil appears to have been of a delicate con- 
stitution, and probably left the fever-bearing regions of 
the Mincio for the higher plain of Milan for sanitary 
reasons, as much as the other, — of studying, as men 
of his parts did study, Greek and philosophy. There is 
a story, indeed, that he studied and practised farriery, 
as his father had done before him ; and Jethro Tull, in 
his crude onslaught upon what he calls the Virgilian 
husbandry, (chap, ix.,) intimates that a farrier could be 
no way fit to lay down the rules for good farm-practice. 
But this story of his having been a horse-doctor rests, 
so far as I can discover, only on this flimsy tradition, — 
that the young poet, on his way to the South of Italy, 
after leaving Milan and Mantua, fell in at Rome mth 
the master-of-horse to Octavianus, and gave such shrewd 
hints to that official in regard to the points and failings 
of certain favorite horses of the Roman Triumvir (for 
Octavianus had not as yet assumed the purple) as to 
gain a presentation to the future Augustus, and rich 
marks of his favor. 

It is certain that the poet journeyed to the South, 

* " Lnsimus: hsec propter CuUcis sint carinina dicta."' 



46 WET DAYS 

and that thenceforward the glorious sunshine of Baiae 
and of the Neapolitan shores gave a color to his poems 
and to his life. 

Yet his agricultural method was derived almost 
wholly from his observation in the North of Italy. He 
never forgot the marshy borders of the Mincio, nor the 
shores of beautiful Benacus (Lago di Garda) ; who 
knows but he may some time have driven his flocks 
a-field on the very battle-ground of Solferino ? 

But the ruralities of Virgil take a special interest 
from the period in which they were written. He fol- 
lowed upon the heel of long and desolating intestine 
wars, — a singing-bird in the wake of vultures. No 
wonder the voice seemed strangely sweet. 

The eloquence of the Senate had long ago lost its 
traditionary power ; the sword was every way keener. 
Who should listen to the best of speakers, when Pom- 
pey was in the forum, covered with the spoils of the 
East ? Who should care for Cicero's periods, when the 
magnificent conqueror of Gaul is skirting the Umbrian 
Marshes, making straight for the Rubicon and Rome ? 

Then came Pharsalia, with its bloody trail, from 
which Caesar rises only to be slaughtered in the Senate- 
Chamber. Next comes the long duel between the 
Triumvirate and the palsied representatives of the 
Republican party. Philippi closes that interlude ; and 
there is a new duel between Octavianus and Antony 



XIRGIL. 47 

(Lepidus counting for nothing). The gallant lover of 
Cleopatra is pitted against a gallant general who is 
a nephew to the first Caesar. The fight comes off at 
Actium, and the lover is the loser ; the jDretty Egyptian 
Jezebel, with her golden-prowed galleys, goes sweeping 
down, under a full press of wind, to swell the squadron 
of the conqueror. The winds will always carry the 
Jezebels to the conquering side. 

Such, then, was the condition of Italy, — its families 
divided, its grain-fields trampled down by the Volscian 
cavalry, its houses red with fresh blood-stains, its homes 
beyond the Po parcelled out to lawless returning sol- 
diers, its public security poised on the point of the 
sword of Augustus, — when Virgil's Bucolics appear : a 
pastoral thanksgiving for the patrimony that had been 
spared him, through court-favor. 

There is a show of gross adulation that makes one 
blush for his manhood ; but withal he is a most lithe- 
some poet, whose words are like honeyed blossoms, and 
whose graceful measure is like a hedge of bloom that 
sways with spring breezes, and spends perfume as it 
sways. 

The Georgics were said to have been written at the 
suggestion of Maecenas, a cultivated friend of Augustus, 
who, like many another friend of the party in power, 
had made a great fortune out of the wars that desolated 
Italy. He made good use of it, however, in patronizing 



48 WET DAYS. 

Virgil, and in bestowing a snug farm in the Sabine coun- 
try upon Horace ; where I had the pleasure of drink- 
ing goats' milk — " dulci digue mero " — in the spring 
of 1846. * 

There can be no doubt but Virgil had been an atten- 
tive reader of Xenophon, of Hesiod, of Cato, and of 
Varro ; otherwise he certainly would have been unwoi*- 
thy of the task he had undertaken, — that of laying- 
down the rules of good husbandry in a way that should 
insure the reading of them, and kindle a love for the 
pursuit. 

I suspect that Virgil was not only a reader of all that 
had been written on the subject, but that he was also an 
insistant questioner of every sagacious landholder and 
every sturdy farmer that he fell in with, whether on the 
Campanian hills or at the house of Maecenas. How 
else does a man accomplish himself for a didactic work 
relating to matters of fact? I suspect, moreover, 
that Virgil, during those half dozen years in which he 
was engaged upon this task, lost no opportunity of in- 
specting every beehive that fell in his way, of measiu-- 
ing the points and graces of every pretty heifer he saw 
in the fields, and of noting with the eye of an artist 
the color of every furrow that glided from the plough. 
It is inconceivable that a man of his intellectual address 
should have given so much of literary toil to a work 
that was not in every essential fully up to the best 



VIRGIL. 49 

practice of the day. Five years, it is said, were given 
to the accomplishment of this short poem. Wliat say 
our poetasters to this ? Fifteen hundred days, we will 
suppose, to less than twice as many lines ; blocking out 
four or five for his morning's task, and all the evening 
— for he was a late worker — licking them into shape, 
as a bear licks her cubs. 

But what good is in it all ? Simply as a work of 
art, it will be cherished through all time, — an earlier 
Titian, whose color can never fade. It was, besides, a 
most beguiling peace-note, following upon the rude blasts 
of war. It gave a new charm to forsaken homesteads. 
Under the Virgilian leadership, Monte Gennaro and the 
heights of Tusculum beckon the Romans to the fields ; 
the meadows by reedy Thrasymene are made golden 
with doubled crops. The Tarentine sheep multiply 
around Benacus, and crop close those dark bits of 
herbage which have been fed by the blood of Roman 
citizens. 

Thus much for the magic of the verse ; but there is 
also sound farm-talk in Virgil. I am aware that Seneca, 
living a few years after him, invidiously objects that 
he was more careful of his language than of his doc- 
trine, and that Columella quotes him charily, — that 
the collector of the " Geoponics " ignores him, and that 
Tull gives him clumsy raillery ; but I have yet to see in 
what respect his system falls short of Columella, or how 
5 



50 WET DAYS. 

it differs materially, except in fulness, from the teachings 
of Crescenzi, who wrote a thousand years and more 
later. There is little in the poem, save its superstitions, 
from which a modern farmer can dissent.* 

AVe are hardly launched upon the first Georgia before 
we find a pretty suggestion of the theory of rotation, — 

" Sic quoque mutatis requiescunt foetibus an^a." 

Rolling and irrigation both glide into the verse a few 
lines later. He insists upon the choice of the best 
seed, advises to keep the drains clear, even upon holy- 
days, (268,) and urges, in common with a gTcat many 
shrewd New-England farmers, to cut light meadov/s 
while the dew is on, (288-9,) even though it involve 
night-work. Some, too, he says, whittle their torches 
by fire-light, of a winter's night ; and the good wife, 
meantime, lifting a song of cheer, plies the shuttle 
merrily. 

In the opening of the second book, Virgil insists, 
very wisely, upon proper adaptation of plantations of 
fruit-trees to different localities and exposures, — a mat- 
ter which is far too little considered by farmers of our 
day. His views in regard to propagation, whether by 
cuttings, layers, or seed, are in agreement with those 

* Of course, I reckon the 

" Exceptantque leves auras ; et siepe sine uUis,'' etc., 
(Lib. in. 274,) as among the superstitions. 



VIRGIL. 51 

of the best Scotch nurserymen ; and in the matter of 
grafting or inoculation, he errs (?) only in declaring 
certain results possible, which even modern gardening 
has not accomplished. Dryden shall help us to the 
pretty falsehood : — 

" The thin-leaved arbiite hazel-grafts receives, 
And planes huge apples bear, that bore but leaves. 
Thus mastfiil beech the bristly chestnut bears. 
And the wild ash is white with blooming pears, 
And greedy swine from grafted elms are fed 
With falling acorns, that on oaks are bred." 

It is curious how generally this belief in something 
like promiscuous grafting was entertained by the old 
writers. Palladius repeats it with great unction in his 
poem " De Insitione," two or three centuries later ; * 
and in the tenth book of the " Geoponics," a certain 
Damogerontis (whoever he may have been) says, (cap. 
Ixv.,) " Some rustic writers allege that nut-trees and 
resinous trees (ra prp-ivrjv exovra) cannot be success- 
fully grafted ; but," he continues, " this is a mistake ; I 
have myself grafted the pistache-nut into the tereben- 
thine." 

Is it remotely possible that these old gentlemen im- 
derstood the physiology of plants better than we ? 

As I return to Virgil, and slip along the dulcet lines, 

* The same writer, under Februarius, Tit. XVII., gives a very cu- 
rious method of grafting the willow, so that it may bear peaches. 



52 WET DAYS. 

I come upon this cracking laconism, in which is com- 
pacted as much wholesome advice as a loose farm-writer 
would spread over a page : — 

" Laudato ingentia rura, 
Exig'unm colito " : 

" Praise big farms ; stick by little ones." The wisdom 
of the advice for these days of steam-engines, reapers, 
and high wages, is more than questionable ; but it is in 
perfect agreement with the notions of a great many old- 
fashioned farmers who live nearer to the heathen past 
than they imagine. 

The cattle of Virgil are certainly no prize-animals. 
Any good committee would vote them doAvn inconti- 
nently : — 

" Cui tiirpe caput, cui plurima cenix," 



(iii. 52,) would not pass muster at any fair of the last 
century, whatever Professor Daubeny may say. 

The horses are better; there is the dash of high 
venture in them ; they have snuffed battle ; their limbs 
are suppled to a bounding gallop, — as where in the 
^neid every resounding hoof- beat upon the dusty 
plain is repeated in the pauses of the poem.* 

The fourth book of the Georgics is full of the mur- 
mur of bees, showing how the poet had listened, and 
had loved to listen. After describing minutely how 

* " Quadi-upedaiite putrem souitu quatit ungula canipum." 



VIRGIL. 53 

and where the homes of the honey-makers are to be 
placed, he offers them this delicate attention: — 

" Then o'er the running stream or standing lake 
A passage for thy weary people make ; 
With osier floats the standing water stxew ; 
Of massy stones make bridges, if it flow; 
That basking in the sun thy bees may lie, 
And, resting there, their flaggy pinions dry." 

Dkyden. 

Who cannot see from this how tenderly the man had 
watched the buzzing yellow-jackets, as they circled and 
stooped in broad noon about some little pool in the 
rills that flow into the Lago di Garda ? For hereabout, 
of a surety, the poet once sauntered through the noon- 
tides, while his flock cropped the " milk-giving cytisus,"* 
upon the hills. 

And charming hills they are, as my own eyes can 
witness : nay, my little note-book of travel shall itself 
tell the story. (The third shelf, upon the right, my 
boy.) 

* This plant, so often mentioned and commended by classic writers, 
Prof. Daubeny behoves to be identical with the Medkago arborea of 
the Greek Archipelago : p. 170, Roman Husbandry. Heresbach (transla- 
tion of Baniaby Googe) describes it as "a plant all haiiy & whytish, 
as Rhamnus is, having branches halfe a yard long & more, where- 
upon groweth leavis like mito Fenigreke or clover, but something 
lesse, having a risfcg crest in the midst of them." — Art of Hus- 
bandry, Book I. 



.54 WET DAYS. 

An Episode. 

"TWTO matter how many years ago, — I was going from 
-*-^ Milan, (to which place I had come by Piacenza 
and Lodi,) on my way to Verona by Brescia and Pes- 
chiera. At Desenzano, or thereabout, the blue lake of 
Benaco first appeared. A few of the higher mountains 
that bounded the view were still capped with snow, 
though it was latter May. Through fragrant locusts 
and mulberry-trees, and between irregular hedges, we 
dashed down across the isthmus of Sermione, where 
the ruins of a Roman castle flout the sky. 

Hedges and orchards and fragrant locusts still hem 
the way, as we touch the lake, and, rounding its south- 
em skirt, come in sight of the grim bastions of Pes- 
chiera. A Hungarian sentinel, lithe and tall, I see 
pacing the rampart, against the blue of the sky. Wom- 
en and girls come trooping into the narrow road, — 
for it is near sunset, — with their aprons full of mul- 
berry-leaves. A bugle sounds somewhere within the 
fortress, and the mellow music swims the water, and 
beats with melodious echo — boom on boom — against 
Sermione and the farther shores. 

The sun just dipping behind the western mountains, 
with a disk all golden, pours down a jOiood of yellow 
light, tinting the mulberry-orchards, the edges of the 
Roman castle, the edges of the waves where the lake 



AN EPISODE. 55 

stirs, and spreading out into a bay of gold where the 
lake lies still. 

Virgil never saw a prettier sight there ; and I was 
thinking of him, and of my old master beating oif 
spondees and dactyls with a red ruler on his thread- 
bare knee, when the sun sunk utterly, and the purple 
shadows dipped us all in twilight. 

" J5J amvato, Signore ! " said the vetturino. True 
enough, I was at the door of the inn of Peschiera, and 
snuffed the stew of an Italian supper. 

Virgil closes the first book of the Georgics with a 
poetic forecast of the time when ploughmen should 
touch upon rusted war-weapons in their work, and tuni 
out helmets empty, and bones of dead soldiers, — 
as indeed they might, and did. But hojv unlike a poem 
it will sound, when the schools are opened on the Rap- 
pahannock again, and the boy scans, — choking down 
his sobs, — 

" Aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanes, 
Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris," 

and the master veils his eyes ! 

I fear that Virgil was harmed by the Georgican 
success, and became more than ever an adulator of the 
ruling powers. I can fancy him at a palace tea-drink- 
ing, where pretty court-lips give some witty turn to his 
" Sic Vos, non Vohis" and pretty court-eyes glance ten- 
derly at Master Maro, who blushes, and asks some 



56 WET DAYS. 

Sabina (not Poppaea) after Tibullus and his Delia. 
But a great deal is to be forgiven to a man who can 
turn compliments as Virgil turned them. What can be 
more exquisite than that allusion to the dead boy Mar- 
cellus, in the Sixth Book of the iEneid ? He is read- 
ing it aloud before Augustus, at Rome. Maecenas is 
there from his tall house upon the Esquiline ; possibly 
Horace has driven over from the Sabine coimtry, — for, 
alone of poets, he was jolly enough to listen to the 
reading of a poem not his own. Above all, the calm- 
faced Octavia, Caesar's sister, and the rival of Cleo- 
patra, is present. A sad match she has made of it 
with Antony ; and her boy Marcellus is just now dead, 

— dying down at Baiae, notwithstanding the care of 
that famous doctor, Antonius Musa, first of hydropaths. 

Virgil had read of the Sibyl, — of the entrance to 
Hades, — of the magic metallic bough that made 
Charon submissive, — of the dog Cerberus, and his sop, 

— of the Greeks who welcomed JEneas, — then of the 
father Anchises, who told the son what brave fate 
should belong to him and his, — warning him, mean- 
time, with alliterative beauty, against the worst of 
wars, — 

" Ne, pueri, ne tanta aniniis assuescite bella, 
Neu patriae validas in viscera vertite vires," — 

too late, alas ! There were those about Augustus who 
could sigh over this. 



AN EPISODE. 57 

Virgil reads on : Anchises is pointing out to ^neas 
that old Marcellus who fought Hannibal ; and beside 
him, full of beauty, strides a young hero about whom 
the attendants throng. 

"And who is the young hero," demands ^iieas, 
" over w^hose brow a dark fate is brooding ? " 

(The bereaved Octavia is listening with a yearning- 
heart.) 

And Anchises, the tears starting to his eyes, says, — 

" Seek not, O son, to fathom the sorrows of thy kin- 
dred. The Fates, that lend him, shall claim him ; a 
jealous Heaven cannot spare such gifts to Rome. Then, 
what outcry of manly grief shall shake the battlements 
of the city ! what a wealth of mourning shall Father Ti- 
ber see, as he sweeps past his new-made grave ! Never 
a Trojan who carried hopes so high, nor ever the land 
of Romulus so gloried in a son." 

(Octavia is listening.) 

" Ah, piety ! alas for the ancient faith ! alas for the 
right hand so stanch in battle ! None, none could meet 
him, whether afoot or with reeking charger he pressed 
the foe. Ah, unhappy youth ! If by any means thou 
canst break the harsh decrees of Fate, thou wilt be — 
Marcellus ! " 

It is Octavia's lost boy ; and she is carried out faint- 
ing. 

But Virgil receives a matter of ten thousand sesterces 



58 WET DAYS. 

a line, — which, allowing for difference in exchange and 
value of gold, may (or may not) have been a matter of 
ten thousand dollars. With this bouncing bag of ses- 
terces, Virgil shall go upon the shelf for to-day. 

TibuUus and Horace. 

rillBULLUvS was the son of a Roman gentleman who 
-^ had been proscribed in the fierce civil wars of the 
Republic, and who probably lost his head, while his es- 
tates were ravaged by pilla^ng soldiers. Such a record 
gave the poet a wholesome horror of war, which he 
emphasizes with a vengeance up and down throughout 
his elegies. Yet he had his own experience of battles, 
— at Philippi and in Aquitania ; but he loved better a 
quiet country-home which he possessed on the edge of 
the Campagna, midway between the heights of Tibur 
and of Tusculum. Horace, I dare say, made him pass 
ing visits there, on his way to the '•'■ frigidum Prmneste " : 
it lay upon the direct road thither from Rome, and I 
suspect that they two made many a jolly night of it 
together. Certain it is that Tibullus was not inveter- 
ate in his prejudices against a social glass. I quote a 
little testimony thereto from the opening elegy of his 
second book : — 

" Now quaff Falemian, let my Chian wine, 
Poured ft-om the cask, in massy goblets shine ! 



TIBULLUS AND HORACE. 59 

Driuk deep, my friends, all, all, be madly gay : 
'Twere sacrilegious not to reel to-day." 

The poet loved the country only less than his Delia 
and Nemesis. And when the latter gives hini the slip 
in Rome, and retires to her farm-villa, he vows that he 
will follow her, (III. Book 2,) and if necessary, disguise 
himself as one of her henchmen of the fields. 

" Cupid joys to learn the ploughman's phrase, 
And, clad a peasant, o'er the fallows strays. 
Oh how the weighty prong I '11 busy wield. 
Should the fair wander to the labored field ! 
A farmer then the crooked ploughshare hold, 
Whilst the dull ox throws up the unctuous mould : 
I'd not complain though Phoebus burnt the lands, 
And painful blisters swelled my tender hands." 

Over and over he weaves into his elegies some tender 
rural scene which shows not only his own taste, but 
what beauties were relished by his admirers — of whom 
he coimted so many — in Rome. 

I must name Horace for the reason of his " Proeul 
beatus,"- etc., if I had no other ; but the truth is, that 
though he rarely wrote intentionally of country-matters, 
yet there was in him that fulness of rural taste which 
bubbled over — in grape-clusters, in images of rivers, 
in snowy Soracte, in shade of plane-trees ; nay, he 
could not so much as touch an amphora but the purple 
juices of the hill-side stained his verse as they stained 
his lip. See, too, what a charming rural spirit there is 



60 WET DAYS 

in his ode to Septimius, (VI. 2) ; and the opening to 
Torquatus * (VII. 4) is the limning of one who has 
followed the changes of the bursting spring with his 
whole heart in his eyes : — 

" The snow is gone, the grass is seen, 
The TTOods wear waving robes of green ; 
'T is spring again, — she wakes, she wakes, 
The icy fetters all she breaks ; 
And every brooklet, wanton, free. 
Goes singing sweetly down the lea." 

Plim/s Country-Places. 

/^N my last wet day I spoke of the elder Pliny, and 
^-^ now the younger Pliny shall tell us something of 
one or two of his country-places. Pliny was a govern- 

* " Diffugere nives, redeunt jam gramma campis," — 
everj' school-boy knows it : but what everj' school-boy does not know, 
and but few of the masters, is this charming, jingling rendering of it 
into the Venetian dialect : — 

" La neve xe and^da, 
Su i prii toma i fiori 
De cento colori, 
E a dosso de i ilbori 
La fogia e tornada 
A farli vestir. 

" Che gusto e dileto 
Che di qiifela tera 
Cambicida de cifera, 
E i fiumi che placidi 
Sbassii nel so' Ifeto 
Va zozo in te '1 mar I " 

This, with other odes, is prettily timied by Sig. Pietro Bussolino, 
and given as an appendix to the Scrit degli Scriiii in Diakito Vene- 
ziano, by Bart. Gamba- 



PLINTS COUNTRY-PLACES. 61 

ment-official, and was rich : whether these facts had any 
bearing on each other I know no more than I should 
know if he had li»ed in our times. 

I know that he had a charming place down by the 
sea, near to Ostium. Two roads led thither : " both of 
them," he says, " in some parts sandy, which makes it 
heavy and tedious, if you travel in a coach ; but easy 
enough for those Avho ride. My villa " (he is writing to 
his friend Gallus, Lib. 11. Epist. 20) '' is large enough 
for all convenience, and not expensive." 

He describes the portico as affording a capital retreat 
in bad weather, not only for the reason that it is pro- 
tected by windows, but because there is an extraordinary 
projection of the roof. " From the middle of this por- 
tico you pass into a charming inner court, and thence 
into a large hall which extends towards the sea, — so 
near, indeed, that under a west wind the waves ripple 
on the steps. On the left of this hall is a large loung- 
ing-room {cvMculum), and a lesser one beyond, with 
windows to the east and west. Tlie angle which this 
lounging-room forms with the hall makes a pleasant lee, 
and a loitering-place for my family in the winter. Near 
this again is a crescent-shaped apartment, with windows 
which receive the sun all day, where I keep my favorite 
authors. From this, one passes to a bedchamber by a 
raised passage, under which is a stove that commu- 
nicates an agreeable warmth to the whole apartment. 



62 WET DAYS. 

The other rooms in this portion of the villa are for 
the freedmen and slaves ; but still are sufficiently well 
ordered (tarn mundis) for my guests." 

And he goes on to describe the bath-rooms, the cool- 
ing-rooms, the sweating-rooms, the tennis-court, " which 
lies open to the warmth of the afternoon sun." Adjoin- 
ing this is a tower, with two apartments below and two 
above, — besides a supper-room, which commands a 
wide lookout along the sea, and over the villas that stud 
the shores. At the opposite end of the tennis-court is 
another tower, with its apartments opening upon a 
museum, — and below this the great dining-hall, whose 
■windows look upon gardens, where are box-tree hedges, 
and rosemary, and bowers of vines. Figs and mulber- 
ries grow profusely in the garden ; and walking under 
them, one approaches still another banqueting-hall, re- 
mote from the sea, and adjoining the kitchen-garden. 
Thence a grand portico (cryptoporticus) extends with a 
range of windows on either side, and before the portico 
is a terrace perfumed with violets. His favorite apart- 
ment, however, is a detached building, which he has 
himself erected in a retired part of the grounds. It 
has a warm winter-room, looking one way on the ter- 
race, and another on the ocean ; through its folding- 
doors may be seen an inner chamber, and within this 
again a sanctmn, whose windows command three views 
totally separate and distinct, — the sea, the woods, or 



FLINT S COUNTRY-PLACES. 63 

the villas along the shore. " Tell me," he says, " if all 
this is not very charming, and if I shall not have the 
honor of your company, to enjoy it with me ? " 

If Pliny regarded the seat at Ostimu as only a con- 
venient and inexpensive place, we may form some notion 
of his Tuscan property, which, as he says in his letter 
to his friend Apollinaris, (Lib. V. Epist. 6,) he prefers 
to all his others, whether of Tivoli, Tusculum, or Pales- 
trina. There, at a distance of a himdred and fifty miles 
from Rome, in the midst of the richest corn-bearing and 
olive-bearing regions of Tuscany, he can enjoy country 
quietude. There is no need to be slipping on his toga ; 
ceremony is left behind. The air is healthful ; the scene 
is quiet. " Studiis ammum, venatu corpus exerceo." 

' " If you were to come here and see the numbers of 
old men who have lived to be grandfathers, and great- 
grandfathers, and hear the stories they can entertain you 
with of their ancestors, you would fancy yourself born 
in some former age. The disposition of the country 
is the most beautiful that can be imagined : figure to 
yourself an immense amphitheatre, but such as only the 
hand of Nature could form. Before you lies a vast 
extended plain, bounded by a range of mountains 
whose summits are crowned with lofty and venerable 
woods, which supply variety of game ; from hence, as 
the mountains decline, they are adorned with under- 
wood. Intermixed with these axe little hills of so 



04 WET DAYS. 

strong and fat a soil that it would be difficult to find a 
single stone upon thera : their fertility is nothing infe- 
rior to that of the lowest grounds ; and though their 
harvest, indeed, is something later, their crops are as 
well ripened. At the foot of these hills the eye is 
presented, wherever it turns, with one unbroken view of 
numberless vineyards, which are terminated by a bor- 
der, as it were, of shrubs. From thence you have a 
prospect of adjoining fields and meadows below. The 
soil of the former is so extremely stiff, and upon the 
first ploughing it rises in such vast clods, that it is neces- 
sary to go over it nine several times with the largest 
oxen and the strongest ploughs, before they can he thor- 
oughly broken ; whilst the enamelled meadows produce 
trefoil, and other kinds of herbage as fine and tender 
as if it were but just sprung up, being continually 
refreshed by never-failing rills." 

I will not follow him through the particularity of the 
description which he gives to his friend Apollinaris. 
There are the wide-reaching views of fruitful valleys 
and of empurpled hill-sides ; there are the fresh winds 
sweeping from the distant Apennines ; there is the 
gestatio with its clipped boxes, the embowered walks, 
the colonnades, the marble banquet-rooms, the baths, 
the Carystian columns, the soft, embracing air, and the 
violet sky. I leave Pliny seated upon a bench in a 
marble alcove of his Tuscan garden. From this bench, 



PLINY'S COUNTRY-PLACES. 65 

the water, gushing through sevei'al little pipes, as if it 
were pressed out by the weight of the persons reposing 
upon it, falls into a stone cistern underneath, whence 
it is received into a polished marble basin, so artfully 
contrived that it is always full, without ever overflowing. 
" When I sup here," he writes, " this basin serves for 
a table, — the larger dishes being placed round the 
margin, while the smaller ones swim about in the form 
of little vessels and Avater-fowl." Such alfresco suppers 
the country-gentlemen of Italy ate in the first century 
of our era ! Pliny was always a friend of the ruling 
powers, and knew how to praise them. 

One more illustration of his country-estates I ventiu-e 
to give, on the following page, in a drawing from Castell. 
It will be observed that there are indications of an 
approach, in some portions of the grounds, to what is 
called the natural style, which is currently supposed to 
be a modem suggestion. There are reasons, however, 
to believe the contrary ; not the least of which may be 
found in a certain passage in the " Annals of Tacitus," * 
cited by Horace Walpole, (Vol. II. p. 523,) which shows 
as great irreverence for the stately formalities of gar- 
dening as either Repton or Price could have desired. 

* " Cetenim Nero usus est patria? ruinis, extruxitque domum, in qua 
baud perinde gemmae et aurum miraculo essent, solita pridem et luxu 
vulgata; quam arva, et stagna, et, in modum soliiudimim, hinc silvce, 
inde nperta spatia, et pi'ospeclus, magistris et macliinatoribus severe 
et celere quibus ingenium et audacia erat etiam qiuc natura denega- 
visset per artem tentare." — Lib. XV. 
5 



66 



WET DAYS. 




PLTNY'S VILLA.* 
* Explanation of references: — 

1. Villa. 4, 4. Slopes with forms of beasts 

2. Gestatio. in boxwood. 

3. Walk around terrace. 5, 5. Terraces. 



PALLADIUS. 67 

Palladius. 

"pALLADIUS wi-ote somewhere about the middle 
-^ of the fourth century. A large part of his work 
is arranged in the form of a calendar for the months, 
and it closes with a poem which is as inferior to the 
poems of the time of Augustus as the later emperors 
were inferior to the Caesars.* There is in his book no 
notable advance upon the teachings of Columella, whom 
he frequently quotes, — as well as certain Greek author- 
ities of the Lower Empire. I find in his treatise a 
somewhat fuller list of vegetables, fruits, and field-crops 

6. Hippodrome. 16. Uudei-wood on decli\dties of 

7. Plane-trees around hippodrome. hill. 

8. Cypress - trees forming wall of 17. Vineyards. 

green. 18. Grain-tields. 

9. Garden-alcoves. 19. River. 

10. Wall of box. 20. Temple of Ceres. 

11. Little meadow of garden. 21. Farmery. 

12. 12. Circles within which were 22. Vivarium or Park. 

landscapes in miniature, with 23. Kitchen-garden, 
mountains, brooks, trees, etc. 24. Orchard. 

13. Walks diverging, shrouded in 25. Apiary. 

moss. 2G. Snailerj'. 

14. Meadow. 27. Hutch for dormice. 

15. Hills covered with heavy 28. Osiers. 

wood. 29. Aqueduct. 

* I drop in a note a little confirmatory stanza De Prunis : — 

" Pruna suis addunt felicia germina membris, 

Donaque cognato corpore laeta feruut. 

Exarmat foetus, sed brachia roboris armat 

Castaaeas prunus jussa tenere larem." 

The botany is as bad as the poetry. 



68 WET DAYS. 

than belongs to the earlier writers. I find more variety 
of treatment. I see a waning faith in the superstitions 
of the past : Bacchus and the Lares are less jubilant 
than they were ; but the Christian civilization has not 
yet vivified the art of culture. The magnificent gar- 
dens of Nero and the horticultural experiences of the 
great Adrian at Tivoli have left no traces in the 
method or inspiration of Palladius. 

Professor Dauheny. 

WILL not pass wholly from the classic period 
without allusion to the recent book of Professoi 
Daubeny on Roman husbandry. It is charming, and 
yet disappointing, — not for failure, on his part, to trace 
the traditions to their sources, not for lack of learning 
or skill, but for lack of that afflatus which should pour 
over and fill both subject and talker, where the talker 
is lover as well as master. 

Daubeny's husbandry lacks the odor of fresh-turned 
ground, — lacks the imprint of loving familiarity. He 
is clearly no farmer : every man who has put his hand 
to the plough {aratori crede) sees it. Your blood does 
not tingle at his story of Boreas, nor a dreamy languoi 
creep over you when he talks of sunny south-mnds. 

Had he written exclusively of bees, or trees, or 
flowers, there would have been a charming murmur, 



THE DARK AGE. 69 

like the susurrus of the poets, — and a fragrance as 
of ci'ushed heaps of Ulies and jonquils. But Daubeny. 
approaches farming as a good surgeon approaches a 
cadaver. He disarticulates the joints superbly ; but 
there is no tremulous intensity. The bystanders do 
not feel the thrill with which they see a man bare his 
arm for a capital operation upon a \i\q and palpitating 
body. 

The Bark Age. 

TTjlROM the time of Palladius to the time of Pietro 
-■- Crescenzi is a period of a thousand years, a period 
as dreary and impenetrable as the snow-cloud through 
which I see faintly a few spires staggering : so along 
the pages of Muratori's interminable annals gaunt fig- 
ures come and go ; but they are not the figures of far- 
mers. 

Goths, wars, famines, and plague succeed each other 
in ghastly procession. Boethius lifts, indeed, a little 
rural plaint from out of the gloom, — 

" Felix niinium prior aetas, 
Contenta fidelibus arvis," * — 

but the dungeon closes over hun ; and there are out- 
standing orders of Charlemagne which look as if he 
had an eye to the crops of Italy, and to a good vegeta- 

*De Coiml. Phil., Lib. II. 



70 WET DAYS. 

ble stew with his Transalpme dinners, — but for the 
most part the land is waste. Dreary and tangled 
marsh-lands, with fevers brooding over them, are around 
Ferrara and Mantua, and along all the upper valley of 
the Arno. Starveling peasants are preyed upon by 
priests and seigneurs. JNo man, powerful or humble, 
could be sure of reaping what he sowed. I see some 
such monster as Eccelino reaping a harvest of blood. 
I see Lombards pouring down from the mountain- 
gates with falcons on their thumbs, ready to poimce 
upon the purple columbce that trace back their lineage 
to the doves Virgil may have fed in the streets of Man- 
tua. I see torrents of people, the third of them women, 
driven mad by some fanatical outcry, sweeping over 
the whole breadth of Italy, and consuming all green 
things as a fire consumes stubble. Think of what the 
fine villa of Pliny would have been, with its boxwood 
bowers and floating dishes, under the press of such 
crusaders ! It was a precarious time for agricultural 
investments : I know nothing that could match it, un- 
less it may have been the later summers' harvests in 
the valley of the Shenandoah. 

Upon a parchment {strumento) of Ferrara, bearing 
date A. D. 1113, (Annals of Muratori,) I find a memo- 
randum of contract which looks like reviving civiliza- 
tion. " Terram mitem illam quam roncaho, frui deheo 
per annos fres ; postea reddam serraticum." The Latin 



GEOPONICA GEOPONICORUM. 71 

is stiff, but the sense is sound. "If I grub up wild 
land, I shall hold it three years for pay." 

I also find, in the sanie invaluable storehouse of medi- 
aeval history, numerous memoranda of agreements, in 
virtue of which the tenant was to deliver to the land- 
lord, or other feudal master, a third or a fourth part of 
all the grain raised, duly threshed, besides a third por- 
tion of the wine, and, in some instances, a special return 
for the cottage, of a young chicken, five sheep, three 
days' work with oxen, and as many of personal labor 
(cum manihus). From the exceeding moderation of 
this apportionment of shares, at a period when the 
working-farmer or rent-payer {livellario) was reckoned 
little better than a brute, we may reasonably infer the 
poverty of the harvests, and the difficulties of culti- 
vation. 

Creoponica Geoponicorum. 

T SHALL make no apology for introducing next to 
the reader the " Geoponica Geoponicormii," — a 
somewhat extraordinary collection of agricultural opin- 
ions, usually attributed, in a loose way, to the Emperor 
Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who held the Byzantine 
throne about the middle of the tenth century. It was 
undoubtedly under the order of Constantine that the 
collection took its present shape ; but whether a body 
of manuscripts under the same name had not previ- 



72 WET DAYS. 

ously existed, and, if so, to whom is to be credited the 
authorship, are questions which have been discussed 
through a wilderness of Greek and Roman type, by 
the various editors. 

The edition before me (that of Niclas, Leipsic) gives 
no less than a hundred images of prolegomena, prefaces, 
introductory observations, with notes to each and all, 
interlacing the pages into a motley of patchwork ; the 
whole preceded by two, and followed by five stately 
dedications. The weight of authority points to Cassia- 
nus Bassus, a Bithynian, as the real compiler, — not- 
withstanding his name is attached to particular chap- 
ters of the book, and notwithstanding he lived as early 
as the fifth century. Other critics attribute the collec- 
tion to Dionysius Uticensis, who is cited by both Varro 
and Columella. The question is unsettled, and is not 
worth the settling.* 

My own opinion — in which, however, Niclas and 
Needham do not share — is, that the Emperor Por- 
phyrogenitus, in addition to his historical and judicial 
labors,! wishing to mass together the best agricultural 

* The work was translated by the Rev. T. Owen of Queen's College, 
Oxford, and published in 1805. I have not, however, been able to see 
a copy of this translation. From a contemporaiy notice in the 
Monthly Review, (Oct. 1800,) I am led to believe that it met with 
very little favor. Arthur Young also speaks of the work with ill- 
founded contempt, in his introduction to A Course of Experiments, 
etc. 

t See Gibbon, — opening of Chapter LIII. 



GEOPONICA GEOPONICORUM. 73 

opinions of the day, expressed that wish to some trusted 
Byzantine official (we may say his Commissioner of 
Patents). Whereupon the Byzantine official (commis- 
sioner) goes to some hungry agricultural friend, of 
the Chersonesus, and lays before him the plan, with 
promise of a round Byzantine stipend. Tlie agricul- 
tural friend goes lovingly to the work, and discovers 
some old compilation of Bassus or of Dionysius, into 
which he whips a few modern phrases, attributes a few 
chapters to the virtual compiler of the whole, makes 
one or two adroit allusions to local scenes, and carries 
the result to the Byzantine official (commissioner). 
The official (commissioner) has confidence in the opin- 
ions and virtues of his agricultural friend, and indorses 
the book, paying over the stipend, which it is found 
necessary to double, by reason of the unexpected cost 
of execution. The official (commissioner) presents the 
report to the Emperor, who receives it gratefully, — at 
the same time approving the bill of costs, which has 
grown into a quadruple of the original estimates. 

This hypothesis will explain the paragraphs which 
so puzzle Niclas and Needham ; it explains the evi- 
dent interpolations, and the local allusions. The only 
extravagance in the hypothesis is its assumption that 
the officials of Byzantium were as rapacious as our 
own. 

Thus far, I have imagined a certain analogy between 



74 WET DAYS. 

the work in view and the " Patent Office Agricultural 
Reports." * The analogy stojDS here : the " Geoponica " 
is a good book. It is in no sense to be regarded as a 
work of the tenth century, or as one strictly Byzantine : 
nearly half the authors named " are of Western origin, 
and I find none dating later than the fifth century, — 
while many, as Apuleius, Fiorentinus, Africanus, and 
the poor brothers Quintilii, who died under the stab of 
Commodus, belong to a period preceding that of Palla- 
dius. Aratus and Democritus (of Abdera) again, who 
are cited, are veterans of the old Greek school, who 
might have contributed as well to the agriculture of 
Thrace or Macedonia in the days of Philip as in the 
days of the Porphyrogenitus. 

The first book, of meteorologic phenomena, is nearly 
identical in its teachings with those of Ai-atus, Varro, 
and Virgil. The subject of field-culture is opened with 
the standard maxim, repeated by all the old writers, 
that the master's eye is invaluable.f The doctrine of 

* I am glad to pay that the Report of the Department of Agriculture 
for 18G2 shows a great gain — in arrangement, in width of discussion, 
and in practical value. Made virtute, Doni. Newton ! 

t As a curious illustration of the rhetoric of the difterent agronomes, 
I give the various wordings of this universal maxim. 

The " Geoponica" has, — " IloXXil} top uypbv ufiecvo) ttolsI dsaTTOTOv 
cvvEXVC Tvapovala." Lib. II. cap. i. 

Columella says, — " Ne ista quidem prKsidia tantum pollent, quan- 
tum vel una prajsentia domini." I. i. 18. 

Cato says, — " Frous occipitio prior est." Cap. iv. 

Palladius puts it, — " Prresentia domini provcctus est agn." I. vi. 



GEOPONICA GEOPONICORUM. 75 

rotation, or frequent change of crops, is laid down with 
unmistakable precision. A steep for seed (hellebore) 
is recommended, to guard against the depredations of 
birds or mice. 

In the second book, in certain chapters credited to 
Fiorentinus, I find, among other valuable manures 
mentioned, sea-weed and tide-drift, (To. ck rJys Oakaa- 
(rr,<: Se eK^Spacro-o/jicva ^pvutSr],) which T do not recall in 
any other of the old writers. He also recommends the 
refuse of leather-dressers, and a mode of promoting 
putrefaction in the compost-heap, which would almost 
seem to be stolen from " Bommer's Method." He fur- 
ther urges the diversion of turbid rills, after rains, over 
grass lands, and altogether makes a better compend of 
this branch of the subject than can be found in the 
Roman writers proper. Grain should be cut before it 
is fully ripe, as the meal is the sweeter. "What corre- 
spondent of our agricultural papers, suggesting this as 
a novelty, could believe that it stood in Greek type as 
early as ever Greek types were set ? A farm foreman 
should be apt to rise early, should win the respect of 
his men, should fear to tell an mitruth, regard religious 
observances, and not drink too hard. 

I'he elder Pliny ^vTites, — " Majores fertilissimum in agro oculura 
domini esse dixerimt." Hist. Nat., Lib. XVIII. cap. ii. 

And Crescen.-^i, more than a thousand years later, rounds it into Ital- 
ian thus: — "La presentia del signore utilita e del campo; e chi aban- 
dona lavigna sara abandonato da lei da lavpratpri." Lib. II. cap. ix, 



76 WET DAYS. 

Three or foiir books are devoted to a very full dis- 
cussion of the vine, and of wines, — not differing 
materially, however, from the Columellan advice. In 
discussing the moral aspects of the matter, this Geo- 
ponic author enumerates other things which will intoxi- 
cate as well as wine, — even some waters ; also the wine 
made from barley and wheat, which barbarians drink. 
Old men, he says, are easily made drunk ; women not 
easily, by reason of temperament ; but by drinking 
enough they may come to it. 

"Where the discourse turns upon pears, (Lib. X. cap. 
xxiii.,) it is urged, that, if you wish specially good fruit, 
you shoidd bore a hole through the trunk at the gromid, 
and drive in a plug of either oak or beech, and draw 
the earth over it. If it does not heal .well, wash for a 
fortnight with the lees of old wine : in any event, 
the wine-lees will help the flavor of the fruit. Almost 
identical directions are to be found in Palladius, (Tit. 
XXV.,) but the above is credited to Diophanes, who 
lived in Asia Minor a full century before Christ. 

Book XL opens with flowers and evergreens, intro- 
duced (by a Latin translation) in a mellifluous roll of 
genitives : — " plantationem rosarum, et lillorum, et vio- 
larum, et reliquorxim Jlorum odoratorum" Thereafter 
is given the pretty tradition, that red roses came of nec- 
tar spilled from heaven. Love, who bore the celestial 
vintage, tripped a Aving, and overset the vase ; and the 



GEOPONICA GEOPONICORUM. 77 

nectar, spilling on the valleys of the earth, bubbled up 
in roses. Next we have this kindred story of the lilies. 
Jupiter wished to make his boy Hercules (born of a 
mortal) one of the gods : so he snatches him from the 
bosom of his earthly mother, Alcmena, and bears him 
to the bosom of the godlike Jmio. The milk is spilled 
from the full-mouthed boy, as he traverses the sky, 
(making the Milky Way,) and what drops below stars 
and clouds, and touches earth, stains the ground with — 
lilies. 

In the chapter upon pot-herbs are some of those 
allusions to the climate of Constantinople which may 
have served to accredit the work in the Byzantme 
coiu't. I find no extraordinary methods of kitchen- 
garden culture, — unless I except the treatment of 
niuskmelon-seeds to a steep of milk and honey, in 
order to improve the flavor of the fruit. (Cap. xx.) 
The I'emaining chapters relate to ordinary domestic ani- 
mals, with diversions to stags, camels, hare, poisons, 
scorpions, and serpents. I can cheerfully commend 
the work to those who have a snowy day on their 
hands, good eyesight, and a love for the subject. 



A 



Crescenzi. 

ND now, while the snow lasts, let us take one look 
at Messer Pietro Crescenzi, a Bolognese of the 



78 WET DAYS. 

fourteenth century. My copy of him is a little, fat, 
unctuous, parchment-bound book of 1534, bought upon 
a street-stall under the walls of the University of Bo- 
logna. 

Through whose hands may it not have passed since 
its printing ! Sometimes I seem to snuff in it the taint 
of a dirty-handed friar, who loved his pot-herbs better 
than his breviary, and plotted his yearly garden on 
some shelf of the hills that look down on Castagnolo : 
other times I scent only the mould and the damp of 
some monastery shelf, that guarded it quietly and clean- 
ly while red-handed war raged around the walls. 

Crescenzi was a man of good family in Bologna, 
being nephew of Crescenzi di Crescenzo, who died in 
1268, an ambassador in Venice. Pietro was educated 
to the law, and, wearying of the civil commotions in his 
native town, accepted judicial positions in the indepen- 
dent cities of Italy, — Pisa and Asti among others ; 
and after thirty years of absence, in which, as he says, 
he had read many authors,* and seen many sorts of 
farming, he gives his book to the world. 

Its arrangement is very similar to that of Palladius, 
to which he makes frequent reference. Indeed, he does 
something more and worse than to refer to him : he 
steals from him by the page. To be sure he had some 

* " E molti libri d' antichi e de' novelli savi lessi e studiai, e diverse 
e varie operazioni de' coltivatori delle ten-e vidi e conobbi." 



CRESCENZl. 79 

nine hundred years of margin, since Palladius lived, 
in the course of which the stock of papyrus had been 
cut off; vellum was dear, and rag-paper was hard- 
ly yet in vogue. It is not probable, therefore, that 
those for whose benefit Crescenzi wrote would detect 
his plagiarisms. Palladius stole from the Greeks far 
and near ; and in repeating the theft Crescenzi only 
restored to the Italians what was theirs by inherit- 
ance. 

But it must not be supposed that he is wholly depend- 
ent upon Palladius. He writes upon the arrangement 
of farmeries like one who had built them, and of horses 
like one who loved them : he tells us of their good 
points and of their bad points, and how they should 
be tested. He is more sensitive than were the Roman 
writers to the disadvantages of a wet soil, and advises 
how it may be treated. He gives rules for mortar- 
making, and suggests that the timber for house-building 
be cut in November or December, in the old of the 
moon. Both Palladius and himself urge the use of 
earthen pipes for conducting water, and give a cement 
Cquick-lime mixed with oil) for making water-tight their 
jimction.* 

In matters of physiology he shows a near approach 

* Lib. I. cap. ix. The pipes named — chccioni di terra — coiild not 
have differed materially from our draining- tile, which we are accus- 
tomed to regard as a mo<lcrn invention. 



80 WET DAYS. 

to modern views : he insists that food for plants must 
be in a liquid form.* 

He quotes Columella's rule for twenty-four loads (car- 
rette) of manure to hill-lands per acre, and eighteen to 
level land ; and adds, — " Our people put the double 
of this," — " / nostri mettano piu chel doppio." 

But the book of our friend Crescenzi is interesting 
not so much for its maxims of agronomic wisdom as for 
its association with one of the most eventful periods 
of Italian history. The new language of the Penin- 
sula t was just now crystallizing into shape, and was 
presently to receive the stamp of currency from the 
hands of Dante and Boccaccio. A thriving conmierce 
through the ports of Venice and Amalfi demanded all 
the products of the hill-sides. Milan, then having a 
population of two hundred thousand, had turned a great 
river into the fields, which to this day irrigates thousands 
of acres of rice - lands. Wheat was grown in profu- 
sion, at that time, on fields w^hich are now desolated by 
the malaria, or by indolence. In the days of Crescenzi, 
gunpowder was burned for the first time in battle ; and 
for the first time crops of grain were paid for in bills 
of exchange. All the Peninsula was vibrating with the 
throbs of a new and more splendid life. The art that 

* " II proprio cibo delle piante sara alcuno humido ben mischiato." 
Cap. xiii. 

t Crescenzi's book was written in Latin, but was very shortlj' after 
(perhaps by himself) rendered into the street>tongue of Italy. 



A FLORENTINE FARM. 81 

hud cropped out of the fashionable schools of Byzan- 
thim was fast putting" them in eclipse ; and before Cres- 
cenzi died, if he loved art on canvas as he loved art 
in gardens, he must have heard admiringly of Cimabue, 
and Giotto, and Orcagna. 

A Florentine Fa'nn. 

TN 1360 a certain Paganino Bonafede composed a 
-■- poem called " H Tesoro de' Rustici " ; but I believe 
it was never published ; and Tiraboschi calls it rather 
dull, — ^^ poco felice." If we could only bar publicity to 
all the poco felice verses ! 

In the middle of the fifteenth century the Florentine 
Poggio * says some good things in a rural way ; and still 
later, that whimsical, disagreeable Politiano, f who was a 
pet of Lorenzo de' Medici, published his " Rusticus." 
Roscoe says, with his usual strained hyperbole, that it 
is inferior in kind only to the Georgics. The fact is, it 
compares with the Georgics as the vilest of the Medici 
compare with the grandest of the Cassars. 

The young Michele Verini, of the same period, has 
given, in one of his few remaining letters, an eloquent 
description of the Cajano farm of Lorenzo de' Medici. 
It lay between Florence and Pistoia. The river Om- 

* Episloln de Laurie Ruris. 

\ See Roscoe, Life of Lwemo de' Medici, Chap. VIII 
G 



82 WET DAYS. 

brone skirted its fields. It was so successfully irrigated 
that three crops of grain grew in a year. Its barns had 
stone floors. Avails with moat, and tov/ers like a castle. 
The cows he kept there (for eAves Avere now superseded) 
were equal to the supply of the entire city of Florence. 
Hogs were fed upon the whey ; and peacocks and pheas- 
ants innumerable roamed through the Avoods. 

Politiano also touches upon the same theme in stiff 
hexameters. They occur in his poem of " Sylva," Avhich 
was written in praise of Homer, but AA^hich closes with 
a descriptive dash at the farm of the great Florentine. 
The reader shall have it, as Englished by Mr. Ros- 
coe: — 

" Go on, Lorenzo, thou, the Muses' pride, 
Pierce the hard rock and scoop the mountain's side ; 
The distant streams shall hear thy potent call, 
And the proud arch receive them as they fall, 
Thence o'er thy fields the genial waters lead. 
That with luxuriant verdure crown the mead. 
There rise thy mounds th' opposing flood that ward; 
There thy domains thy faithful mastilFs guard; 
Tarentum there her horned cattle sends, 
Whose swelling teats the milky rill distends; 
There India's breeds of various colors I'ange, 
Pleased with the novel scene and pastures strange, 
"Whilst nightly closed within their sheltered stall 
For the due treat their lowing offspring call. 
Meantime the milk in spacious coppers boils, 
With arms upstript the elder rustic toils. 
The young assist the curdled mass to squeeze, 



A FLORENTINE FARM. 83 

Ami place in cooling shades the new-made cheese. 

Where inulberry-gi-oves their length of shadow spread 

Secure the silk-worm spins his lustrous thread ; 

And, culled from every flower the plunderer meets, 

The bee regales thee with her rifled sweets ; 

There birds of various plume and various note 

Flutter their captive wings : with cackling throat 

The Paduan fowl betrays her future breed, 

And there the geese, once Home's preservers, feed, 

And ducks amusive sport amidst thy floods, 

And doves, the pride of Venus, throng thy woods." 

While I write, wandering in fancy to that fair plain 
where Florence sits a qneen, with her girdle of shining 
rivers, and her garland of olive-bearing hills, — the 
snow is passing. The spires ha^•e staggered plainly and 
stiffly into sight. Again I .can count them, one by one. 
I have brought as many authors to the front as there 
are spires staring at me from the snow. 

Let me marshal them once more : — Verini, the 
young Florentine ; Politiano, who cannot live in peace 
with the wife of his patron ; Crescenzi, the magistrate 
and farmer joined ; the half-score of dead men who lie 
between the covers of the " Geoponica " ; the martyr 
Boethius, who, imder the consolations of a serene, per- 
haps Christian philosophy, cannot forget the charm of 
the fields ; Palladius, who is more full than original ; 
Pliny the Consul, and the friend of Tacitus ; Tibullus, 
the elegiac lover; Horace, whose very laugh is hum- 



84 WET DAYS. 

ming with the buxom cheer of the country ; and last, — 
Virgil. 

I hear no such sweet bugle-note as his along all the 
line ! Hark I — 

" Claudite jam rivos, pueri, sat prata biberunt." • 

Even so : Claudite jam lih-os, parvuli ! — Shut up the 
books, my little ones ! Enough for to-day. 



TEIRD DAY. 



A Picture of Rain. 

"TTTILL any of our artists ever give us, on canvas, 
^ a good, rattling, saucy shower ? There is room 
in it for a rare handling of the brush : — the vague, in- 
distinguishable line of hills, (as I see them to-day,) — 
the wild scud of gray, with fine gray lines, slanted by 
the wind, and trending eagerly downward, — the swift, 
petulant dash into the little pools of the highway, mak- 
ing fairy bubbles that break as soon as they form, — 
the land smoking with excess of moisture, — and the 
pelted leaves all wincing and shining and adrip. 

I know no painter who has so well succeeded in put- 
ting a wet sky into his pictures as Turner ; and in this 
I judge him by the literal chiaroscuro of engraving. In 
proof of it, I take down from my shelf his " Rivers of 
France " : a book over which I have spent a great many 
pleasant hours, and idle ones too, — if it be idle to 
travel leagues at the turning of a page, and to see hill- 
sides spotty with vineyards, and great bridges wallow- 



86 WET DAYS. 

ing through the Loire, and to watch the fishermen of 
Honfleur putting to sea. There are skies, as I said, in 
some of these pictures Avliich make a man instinctively 
think of his umbrella, or of his distance from home : no 
actual rain-drift stretching from them, but such unmis- 
takable promise of a rainy afternoon, in their little par- 
allel vnsTps of dark-bottomed clouds, as would make a 
provident farmer order every scythe out of the field. 

In the " Chair of Gargantua," on which my eye falls, 
as I turn over the pages, an actual thunder-storm is 
brealdng. The scene is somewhere upon the Lower 
Seine. From the middle of the left of the picture the 
lofty river-bank stretch.es far across, forming all the 
background ; — its extreme distance hidden by a bold 
thrust of the right bank, which juts into the picture just 
far enough to shelter a white village, which lies gleam- 
ing upon the edge of the water. On all the foreground 
lies the river, broad as a bay. The storm is coming 
down the stream. Over the left spur of the bank, and 
over the meeting of the banks, it broods black as night. 
Through a little rift there is a glunpse of serene sky, 
from which a mellow light streams down upon the edges 
and angles of a few cliffs upon the farther shore. All 
the rest is heavily shadowed. The edges of the coming 
tempest are tortuous and convulsed, and you know that 
a fierce wind is driving the black billows on ; yet all 
the water under the lee of the shores is as tranquil as 



SOUTHERN FRANCE AND TROUBADOURS. 87 

a dream ; a white sail, near to the white viHage, hangs 
slouchingly to the mast : but in the foreground the tem- 
pest has already caught the water ; a tall lugger is 
scudding and careening under it as if mad ; the crews 
of three fishermen's boats, that toss on the vexed water, 
are making a confused rush to shorten sail, and you 
may almost fancy that you hear their outcries sweeping 
down the wind. In the middle scene, a little steamer 
is floating tranquilly on AA^ater which is yet calm ; and a 
column of smoke piling up from its tall chimney rises 
for a space placidly enough, until the wind catches and 
whisks it before the storm. I would wager ten to one, 
upon the mere proof in the picture, that the fisher- 
men and the washerwomen in the foreground will be 
drenched within an hour. 

When I have once opened the covers of Turner, — 
especially upon such a wet day as this, — it is hard for 
me to leave him until I have wandered all up and down 
the Loire, revisited Tours and its quiet cathedral, and 
Blois with its stately chateau, and Amboise with its 
statelier, and coquetted again with memories of the 
Maid of Orleans. 

Southern France and Troubadours. 

TTIROM the Upper Loire it is easy to slip into the 
-*~ branching valleys which sidle away from it far down 



88 WET DAYS, 

into the country of the Auvergne. Turner does not 
go there, indeed ; the more 's the pity ; but I do, since 
it is the most attractive region rurally (Brittany perhaps 
excepted) in all France. The valleys are green, the 
brooks are frequent, the rivers are tortuous, the moun- 
tains are high, and luxuriant walnut-trees embower the 
roads. It was near to Moulins, on the way hither, 
through the pleasant Bourbonnois, that Tristram 
Shandy met with the poor, half-crazed Maria, piping 
her evening service to the Virgin. 

And at that thought I must do no less than pull down 
my " Tristram Shandy," (on which the dust of years 
has accumulated,) and read again that tender story of 
the lorn maiden, with her attendant goat, and her hair 
caught up in a silken fillet, and her shepherd's pipe, 
from which she pours out a low, plaintive wail upon the 
evening air. 

It is not a little singular that a British author should 
have supplied the only Arcadian resident of all this 
Arcadian region. The Abbe Delille was, indeed, born 
hereabout, within sight of the bold Puy de Dome, and 
within marketing - distance of the beautiful Clermont. 
But there is very little that is Arcadian, in freshness or 
simplicity, in either the " Gardens " or the other verse 
of Delille. 

Out of his own mouth (the little green-backed book, 
my boy) I will condemn him : — 



SOUTHERN FRANCE AND TROUBADOURS. 89 

" Ce n'est plus cette simple et rustique d(!'esse 
Qui suit ses vieilles lois ; c'est une enchanteresse 
Qui, la baguette en main, par des hardis travaux 
Fait naitre des aspects et des tr^sors nouveaux, 
Compose im sol plus riche et des races plus belles, 
Fertilise les monts, dompte les rocs rebelles." 

The baguette of Delille is no shepherd's crook ; it has 
more the fashion of a drumstick, — baguette de tambour. 

If I follow on southward to Provence, whither I am 
borne upon the scuds of rain over Turner's pictures, 
and the pretty Bourbonnois, and the green mountains 
of Auvergne, I find all the characteristic literature of 
that land of olives is only of love or war : the vines, the 
olive-orchards, and the yellow hill-sides pass for noth- 
ing. And if I read an old Sirvente of the Troubadours, 
beginning with a certain redolence of the fields, all this 
yields presently to knights, and steeds caparisoned, — 
" Cavalliers ab cavals armatz." 

■ The poem from which I quote has a smooth sound 
and a certain promise of ruralities. It is attributed to 
Bertrand de Born,* who lived in the time when even 
the lion-hearted King Richard turned his brawny fin- 
gers to the luting of a song. Let us listen : — 

*' The beautiful spring delights me well, 
When flowers and leaves are growing; 
And it pleases my heart to hear the swell 
Of the birds' sweet chorus flowing 

* M. Raynouard, Poesies des Traicbadours, II. 209. 



90 WET DAYS 

In the echoing wood ; 
And I love to see, all scattered around, 
Pavilions and tents on the martial ground; 

And my spirit finds it good 
To see, on the level plains beyond, 
Gay knights and steeds caparisoned." 

But as the Troubadour nestles more warmly into the 
rhythm of his verse, the birds are all forgotten, and the 
beautiful spring, and there is a sturdy clang of battle, 
that would not discredit our own times : — 

" I tell you that nothing my soul can cheer, 
Or banqueting or reposing, 
Like the onset cry of ' Charge them ! ' rung 
From each side, as in battle closmg; 
Where the horses neigh, 
And the call to ' aid ' is echoing loud. 
And there, on the earth, the lowly and proud 

In the foss together lie. 
And yonder is piled the mingled heap 
Of the brave that scaled the trenches steep. 

" Barons ! your castles in safety place, 

Your cities and villages, too. 
Before ye haste to the battle-scene : 

And Papiol ! quickly go. 
And tell the lord of ' Yes and No ' 
That peace already too long hath been ! " * 

* I cannot forbear taking a bit of margin to print the closing stan- 
zas of the original, which cany the clash of sabres in their veiy 
soimd. 

" le us die que tan no m' a sabor 
Manjars ni beure ni dormir. 
Cum a quaut aug cridar : A lor ! 



AMONG THE ITALIANS. 91 

I am on my way to Italy, (it may as M^ell be con- 
fessed,) where I had fully intended to open my rainy 
day's work ; but Turner has kept me, and then Au- 
vergne, and then the brisk battle-song of a Trouba- 
dour. 

Among the Italians. 

TTTHEN I was upon the Cajano farm of Lorenzo 
* » the Magnificent, during my last "' spell of wet," 
it was uncourteous not to refer to the pleasant com- 
memorative poem of " Ambra," which Lorenzo himself 
wrote, and which, whatever may be said against the 
conception and conduct of it, shows in its opening 
stanzas that the great Medici was as appreciative of 
rural images — fir-boughs with loaded snows, thick cy- 
presses in which late birds lurked, sharp-leaved juni- 
pers, and sturdy pines fighting the Avind — as ever he 

D' ambas las partz ; et aug agnir 

Cavals Toitz per 1' ombratge, 
Et aug cridar : Aidatz ! Aidatz '. 
E vei cazer per los fossatz 

Paucs e grans per 1' erbatge, 
E Tei los mortz que pels costatz 
An los tronsons outre passatz. 

" Baros, metetz en gatge 
Castels e vilas e ciutiitz, 
Enans q' usquecs no us guerreiatz. 

"Papiol, d' agradatge 

Ad Oc e No V en vai viatz, 

Die li que trop estan en patz." 



92 WET DAYS. 

had been of antique jewels, or of the verse of such 
as Politiano. And if I have spoken slightingly of this 
latter poet, it was only in contrast with Virgil, and in 
view of his strained Latinity. When he is hhnself, 
and wraps his fancies only in his own sparkling Tuscan, 
we forget his classic frigidities, and his quarrels with 
Madonna Clarice, and are willing to confess that no 
pen of his time was cUpped with such a relishing gusto 
into the colors of the hyacinths and trembling pansies, 
and into all the blandishments of a giishing and wan- 
ton sj^ring. I may particularly designate a charming 
little rural poem of his, entitled " Le Montanine," 
charmingly translated by Parr Greswell.* 

But classical affectation was the fashion of that day. 
A certain Bolognese noble, Bero by name, wrote ten 
Latin books on rural afifau-s ; yet they are little known, 
and never had any considerable reputation. Another 
scholar, Pietro da Barga, who astonished his teachers 
by his wonderful proficiency at the age of twelve, and 
who was afterward guest of the French ambassador in 
Venice, wrote a poem on rural matters, to which, with 
an exaggerated classicism, he gave the Greek name 
of " Cynegeticou" ; and about the same time Giuseppe 
Voltolina composed three books on kitchen-gardening. 
I name these writers only out of sympathy with their 

* See Wm. Parr Greswell's Memoirs of Politiano, with teansla- 
tions. 



AMONG THE ITALIANS. 93 

topics : I would not advise the reading of them : it 
would involve a long journey and scrupulous search to 
find them, through I know not v/hat out-of-the-way 
libraries ; and if found, no essentially new facts or the- 
ories could be counted on which are not covered by the 
treatise of Crescenzi. The Pisans or Venetians may 
possibly have introduced a few new plants from the 
East ; the example of the Medici may have suggested 
some improvements in the arrangement of forcing- 
houses, or the outlay of villas ; but in all that regarded 
general husbandry, Crescenzi was still the man. 

I linger about this period, and the writers of this 
time, because I snuff here and there among them the 
perfume of a country bouquet, which carries the odor 
of the fields with it, and transports me to the " em- 
purpled hill-sides " of Tuscany. Shall I name Sanna- 
zaro, with his " Arcadia " ? — a dead book now, — or 
" Amyntas," who, before he is tall enough to steal apples 
from the lowest boughs, (so sings Tasso,) plunges head 
and ears in love with Sylvia, the fine daughter of 
Montano, who has a store of cattle, " richissimo d' 
armenti " ^ 

Then there is Rucellai, who, under the pontificate of 
Leo X., came to be Governor of the Castle of Sant' 
Angelo, and yet has left a poem of fifteen hundred lines 
devoted to Bees. In his suggestions for the allaying 
of a civil war among these winged people, he is quite 



94 WET DAYS. 

beyond either Virgil or Mr. Lincoln. " Pluck some 
leafy branch," he says, " and with it sprinkle the con- 
tending factions with either honey or sweet grape-juice, 
and you shall see them instantly forego their strife " : — 

" Tlie two warriHg bands joyful unite, 
And foe embraces foe : each with its lips 
Licking the others' wings, feet, arms, and breast, 
Whereon the luscious mixture hath been shed, 
And all inebriate with delight." 

So the Swiss,* he continues, when they fall out among 
themselves, are appeased by some grave old gentleman, 
who says a few pleasant words, and orders up a good 
stoop of sweet wine, in which all parties presently dip 
their beards, and laugh and embrace and make peace, 
and so forget outrage. 

Guarini, with all his affectations, has little prettinesses 
which charm like the chirping of a bird; — as where he 
paints (in the very first scene of the " Pastor Fido ") 
tlie little sparrow flitting from fir to beech, and froin 
beech to myrtle, and twittering, " How I love ! how I 

* " Come quando nei Suizzeri si muove 
Sedizione, e clie si grida a 1' arnie ; 
Se qualcho nom grave allor si leva in piede 
E comiucia a parlar con dolce lingua, 
Mitiga i petti barbari e foroci ; 
E intanto fa porlare ondauti vasi 
Pieni di dolci ed odorati vini; 
Allora ognun le labbra o '1 inento immerge 
Ne' le spumanii tazzc," etc. 



AMOSG THE ITALIANS. 05 

love ! " And the bird-mate (" il sua dolce desio ") twit- 
ters in reply, " How I love, how I love, too ! " " Ardo d' 
amove ancli to." 

Messer Pietro Bembo was a different man from Gua- 
rini. I cannot imagine him listening to the sparrows ; 
I cannot imagine him plucking a flower, except he 
have some courtly gallantry in hand, — perhaps toward 
the Borgia. He was one of those pompous, stiff, scho- 
lastic prigs who wrote by rules of syntax ; and of syn- 
tax he is dead. He was clever and learned ; he wrote 
in Latin, Italian, Castilian : but nobody reads him ; he 
has only a little crypt in the " Autori Diversi." I think 
of him as I think of fine women who must always 
rustle in brocade embossed wifli hard jewels, and who 
never win the triumphs that belong to a charming morn- 
ing deshabille with only the added improvisation of a 
rose. 

In his " Asolani " Bembo gives a very full and minute 
description of the gardens at Asolo, which relieved the 
royal retirement of Caterina, the Queen of Cyprus. 
Nothing could be more admirable than the situation : 
there were skirts of mountains which were covered, and 
are still covered, with oaks ; there were grottos in the 
sides of cliffs, and water so disposed — in jets, in pools 
enclosed by marble, and among rocks — as to counter- 
feit all the wildness of Nature ; there was the same 
stately array of cypresses, and of clipped hedges, which 



aC^ WET DAYS. 

had belonged to the villas of Pliny ; temples were dec- 
orated with blazing frescos, to which, I dare say, Car- 
paccio may have lent a hand, if not that wild rake, 
Giorgione. Here the pretty Queen, with eight thousand 
gold ducats a year, (whatever that amount may have 
been,) and some seventy odd retainers, held her court ; 
and here Bembo, a dashing young fellow at that time 
of seven or eight and twenty, became a party to those 
disquisitions on Love, and to those recitations of song, 
part of which he has recorded in the " Asolani." I am 
sorry to say, the beauty of the place, so far as regards 
its artificial features, is now all gone. The hall, which 
may have served as the presence-chamber of the Queen, 
was only a few years since doing service as a farmer's 
barn ; and the traces of a Diana and an Apollo Avere 
still coloring the wall imder which a few cov/s were 
crunching their clover-hay. 

All the gardening of Italy at that period, as, indeed, 
at almost all times, depended very much upon architec- 
tural accessories : colonnades and wall-veil v/ith frescos 
make a large part of Italian gardening to this day. 
The Isola Bella in the Lago Maggiore, and the Eor- 
ghese Garden at Eome, are fair types. And as I recall 
the sunny vistas of this last, and the noontide loungings 
upon the marble seats, counting white flecks of statues 
amid the green of cypresses, and watching the shadow 
which some dense-topped pine flings upon a marble 



AMONG THE ITALIANS. 97 

flight of steps or a marble balustrade, I cannot sneer at 
the Italian gardening, or wish it were other than it is. 
The art-life of Italy is the crowning and the overlap- 
ping life. The CanijDagna seems only a bit of foreground 
to carry the leaping arches of the aqueducts, and to throw 
the hills of Tivoli and Albano to a purple distance. 
The farmers (fatfori) who gallop across the fields, in 
rough sheepskin wrappers, and upon scurvy-looking 
ponies, are more picturesque than thrifty ; and if I gal- 
lop in company with one of them to his home upon the 
farther edge of the Campagna, (which is an allowable 
wet-day fancy,) I shall find a tall stone house smeared 
over roughly with plaster, and its ground-floor devoted 
to a crazy cart, a pony, a brace of cows, and a few goats ; 
a rude court is walled in adjoining the house, where a 
few pigs are grunting. Ascending an oaken stair-way 
within the door, I come upon the liA'ing-room of the 
faitore ; the beams overhead are begrimed with smoke, 
and garnished here and there with flitches of bacon ; a 
scant fire of fagots is struggling into blaze upon an open 
hearth ; and on a low table, bare of either cloth or 
cleanliness, there waits him his supper of polenta, which 
is nothing more or less than our plain boiled Indian- 
pudding. Add to this a red-eyed dog, that seems to be 
a savage representative of a Scotch colley, — a lean, 
wrinkled, dark-faced woman, who is unwinding the ban- 
dages from a squalling bambino. — a mixed odor of 
7 



98 WET DAYS. 

garlic and of goats, that is quickened with an amrao- 
niacal pungency, — and you may form some idea of 
the home of a small Eoman farmer in our day. It 
falls away from the standard of Cato ; and so does 
the man. 

He takes his twenty or thirty acres, upon shares, from 
some wealthy proprietor of Rome, whose estate may 
possibly cover a square mile or two of territory. He 
sells vegetables, poultry, a little grain, a few curds, and 
possibly a butt or two of sour wine. He is a type of a 
great many who lived within the limits of the old 
Papal territory: whether he and they have dropped 
their musty skeepskins and shaken off their unthrift 
under the new government, I cannot say. 

Around Bologna, indeed, there was a better race of 
farmers : the intervening thrift of Tuscany had always 
its influence. The meadows of Terni, too, which are 
watered by the Velino, bear three full crops of grass in 
the season ; the valley of the Clitumnus is like a minia- 
ture of the Genesee ; and around Perugia the crimson- 
tasselled clovers, in the season of their bloom, give to 
the fields the beauty of a garden. 

The old Duke of Tuscany, before he became soured 
by his political mishaps, v.as a great patron of agricul- 
tural improvements. He had princely farms in the 
neighborhood both of his capital and of Pisa. Of the 
latter I cannot speak from personal observation ; but 



AMONG THE ITALIANS. 99 

the dairy-farm, Cascina, near to Florence, can hardly 
have been much inferior to the Cajano property of the 
great Lorenzo. The stables were admirably arranged, 
and of permanent character ; the neatness was equal to 
that of the dairies of Holland. The Swiss cows, of a 
pretty dun-color, were kept stalled, and luxuriously fed 
upon freshly cut ray-gi'ass, clover, or vetches, with an 
occasional sprinkling of meal ; the calves were invari- 
ably reared by hand ; and the average per diem of milk, 
throughout the season, was stated at fourteen quarts ; 
and I think Madonna Clarice never strained more than 
this into the cheese-tubs of Ambra. I trust the burgh- 
ers of Florence, and the new Gonfaloniere, whoever he 
may be, will not forget the dun cows of the Cascina, or 
their baitings with the tender vetches. 

The redemption of the waste marsh-lands in the Val 
di Chiana by the engineering skill of Fossombroni, and 
the consequent restoration of many thousands of acres 
which seemed hopelessly lost to fertility, is a result of 
which the Medici would hardly have dreamed, and 
which would do credit to any age or country. 

About the better - cultivated portions of Lombardy 
there is an almost regal look. The roads are straight, 
and of most admirable construction. Lines of trees lift 
their stateliness on either side, and carry trailing fes- 
toons of vines. On both sides streams of water are 
flowing in artificial canals, interrupted here and there 



100 WET DAYS. 

by cross sluices and gates, by means of which any or 
all of the fields can be laid under water at pleasure, so 
that old meadows return three and four cuttings of grass 
in the year. There are patches of Indian-corn which 
are equal to any that can be seen on the Miami ; hemp 
and flax appear at intervals, and upon the lower lands 
rice. The barns are huge in size, and are raised from 
the ground upon columns of masonry. 

I have a dapper little note-book of travel, from which 
these facts are mainly taken ; and at the head of one 
of its pages I observe an old ink - sketch of a few 
trees, with festoons of vines between. It is yellowed 
now, and poor always ; for I am but a dabbler at such 
things. Yet it brings back, clearly and briskly, the 
broad stretch of Lombard meadows, the smooth Mac- 
adam, the gleaming canals of water, the white finials of 
Milan Cathedral shining somewhere in the distance, 
the thrushes, as in the "Pastor Fido," filling all the 
morning air with their sweet 

" Ardo d' amore ! ardo d' amore ! " 

the dewy clover-lots, looking like wavy silken plush, the 
green glitter of mulberry-leaves, and the beggar in 
steeple-crowned hat, who says, " Grazia," and " A rive- 
dervi ! " as I drop him a few lu-eutzers, and rattle away 
to the North, and out of Italy. 



CONRAD HERESBACH. 101 

Conrad Heresbach. 

A BOUT the year 1570, Conrad Heresbach, who was 
-*-^ Councillor to the Duke of Cleves, (brother to that 
unfortunate Anne of Cleves, a wife-victim of Henry 
VHI.,) wrote four Latin books on rustic affairs, which 
were translated by Barnaby Googe, a Lincolnshire 
farmer and poet, who was in his day gentleman-pen- 
sioner to Queen Elizabeth. Our friend Barnaby intro- 
duces his translation in this style : — "I haue thought 
it meet (good Reader) for thy further profit & pleasure, 
to put into English these foure Bookes of Husbandry, 
collected & set forth by Master Conrade Heresbatch, 
a great & a learned Counceller of the Duke of Cleues : 
not thinking it reason, though I haue altered & in- 
creased his worke, with mine oione readings Sf ohserua- 
tions, ioined with the experience of sundry my friends, 
to take from him (as diuers in the like case haue done) 
the honour & glory of his owne trauaile : Neither is it 
my minde, that this either his doings or mine, should 
deface, or any wayes darken the good enterprise, or 
painfull trauailes of such our countrymen of Eng- 
land, as haue plentifully written of this matter : but 
always haue, & do giue them the reuerence & hon- 
our due to so vertuous, & well disposed Gentlemen, 
namely. Master Fitz herhert, & Master Tusser : whose 
workes may, in my fancie, without any presumption, 



102 WET DAYS. 

compare ^vith any, either Vai-ro, Columella, er Palla- 
dius of Rome." 

There is a delightful simplicity of manner about the 
conduct of this old " Book of Husbandry," of which, I 
doubt not, a large measure is to be attributed to the 
Lincolnshire farmer. It is, like the greater part of 
Xenophon's " (Economicus, " in the form of dialogue, 
and its quaintness, its naivete, its Christian unction, give 
good reason for the suggestion of Sir Harris Nicolas, 
— that we are indebted to it for Walton's cast of the 
" Angler." The parties to the first conversation, " Of 
Earable-ground and Tillage," are Cono, a country-gen- 
tleman, Metella, his wife, Rigo, a citizen, and Hermes, 
a servant. 

" Ah maister Cono (says Rigo,) I am glad I haue 
foimd you in the midst of your country pleasures : 
surely you are a happy man, that shifting yourselfe from 
the turmoiles of the court, can picke out so quiet a 
life, & giving over all, can secretly lie hid in the pleas- 
ant Countries, suffering us in the meane time to be tost 
with the cares & businesse of the common weale." 

And thereupon the discourse opens concerning the 
pleasures and duties of a country-life, and the reconcile- 
ment of them with a due regard for the public welfore. 
And as they push on good-naturedly in the discussion, 
Rigo says, " Tell me I beseech you, how you bestow 
your time, & hoAV you are occupied all the day." 



CONRAD HERESBACH. 103 

"With whicli request Cono most willingly complies, 
and gives us this unique picture of the occupations of 
a well-to-do coiuitry-gentleman of the Continent, about 
the middle of the sixteenth century : — 

" I use commonly to rise, first of all myselfe, specially 
in Sommer, when we lose the healthfullest & sweet- 
est time with sluggishnesse. In the Winter, if I be 
loathe, if either the unreasonablenesse of the weather 
or sicknesse cause me to keepe my bed, I commit all to 
my Steward, whose faith & diligence I am sure of, 
whom I haue so well instructed, that I may safely make 
him my deputie : I haue also Euriclia my maid, so skil- 
ful in huswifery, that shee may well be my wives suffra- 
gan ; these twaine we appoint to supply our places : but 
if the weather & time serve, I play the workemaster 
myselfe. And though I haue a Baylife as skilfull as 
may be, yet remembering the old saying, that the best 
doung for the field is the master's foot, & the best 
provender for the Horse the Masters eye, I play the 
overseer myselfe. 

" When my servants are all set to worke, & everie 
man as busie as may be, I get me into my closet to 
serve God, & to reade the holy Scriptures : (for this 
order I always keepe to appoint myselfe everie day my 
taske, in reading some part eithet- of the old Testament 
or of the new ;) that done, I write or read such things 
as I thinke most needfull, or dispatch what businesse 



104 WET DAYS. 

soever I have in my house, or wth sutors abroad. A 
little before dinner I walke out, if it be faire, either in 
my garden, or in the fields ; if it be foule, in my gal- 
lerie : when I come in, I find an egge, a chicke, a peece 
of kid, or a peece of veale, fish, butter, & such like, 
as my foldes, my yarde, or my dairie & fishponds will 
yeeld : sometimes a Sallat, or such fruits as the garden 
or orchard doth beare : which victuals without aney 
charges my wife provideth me, wherewith I content my- 
selfe as well as if I had the daintiest dish in Europe : I 
never lightly sit above one houre at my meate : after 
dinner. I passe the time with talking with my wife, my 
servants, or if I have any, with my ghests : I rise «& 
walke about my ground, where I view my workemen, 
my Pastures, my Meddowes, my Corne, & my Cattel. 
.... In the meanwhile I behold the wonderfull wise- 
dome of Nature & the incomprehensible working of the 
most Mighty God in his creatures. Here waigh I with 
myselfe, the benefits & wonderfull workes of His, who 
bringeth forth grasse for the Cattel, & greene hearbe 
for the use of man. With these sights do I recreate 
my minde, & give thanks imto God the creator & con- 
server of all things, singing the song ' Praise thou the 
Lord oh my soule ! ' 

" Then returning home, I go to writing or reading, or 
such other businesse as I have : but with study or inven- 
tion, I never meddle in three houres after I have dined. 



CONRAD HERESBACH. lUo 

I suppe with a small pittance, & after supper I either 
seldome or never write or reade, but rather passe the 
time seeing my sheepe come home from the Fielde, & 
my Oxen dragging home the plow with weary neckes, 
in beholding the pleasant pastures sweetly smelling 
about my house, & my heards of Cattel lowing hard 
by mee : sometimes I list to rest mee under an old 
Holme, sometimes upon the greene grasse ; in the 
meantime passeth by mee the pleasant River, the 
streames falling from the springs with a comfortable 
noise ; or else walking by the River-side, or in my gar- 
den or neerest pastures, I confer with my wife or ser- 
Aants of husbandry, appointing what things I will have 
done : if my Baylife have any thing to say, if any thing 
be to be bought or sold : for a good husband, as Cato 
saith, must rather bee a seller than a buyer. Sometimes, 
(specially in winter) after supper, I make my minister 
to tell something out of the holy Scripture, or else some 
pleasant story, so that it be honest & godly, & such 
as may edifie. Two or three hours after supper I get 
me to bed, & commonly as I said before, the last in 
the house except my Chamberlaine & my Steward." 

Heresbach cites familiarly and very frequently tlie 
elder authors, particularly Cato and Varro ; he accepts 
with an easy conscience too many of the old fables of 
the Latinists ; he has abiding faith in " the moon being 
aloft " in time of sov/ing ; he assures us that " if you 



106 WET DAYS. 

grafFe your jjeare upon a Mulbery, you shall have red 
Peares ; the Medlar being grafFed upon the Thorne, the 
grafFe groweth to great bignesse ; Upon the Pine tree it 
bringeth a sweet fruit but not lasting." Again he tells 
us, " If you break to powder tlie home of a Ram & 
sowe it watering it well, it is thought it will come to be 
good Sperage " (asparagus). 

Yet he holds in proper discredit the heathen galaxy 
of gods, and when Thrasybulus (one of the parties to 
his talk upon orcharding) asks who first planted the 
vine, and says " the common sort doe attribute the first 
invention of it to Bacchus," the good Heresbach (in the 
person of Marius) puts him down in this style : " We 
that are taught by God's holy worde, doe know that it 
was first found out by the Patriarke Noah, immediately 
after the drowning of the world : It may be, the Wine 
was before that time, though the planting & the use 
thereof was not then knowne. The heathen both most 
falsely & very fondly, as in many other things, doe 
give the invention of the same unto the God Bacchus. 
But Noah lived many yeeres before either Bacchus, Sa- 
turnus, or Uranius were borne." 

Of butter, upon which the elder Latiuists * do not 
descant, he gives us this primitive account ; and I know 

* The word buiyrum occurs once in Columella, as an application to a 
wound in a sheep. Even Crescenzi makes no mention of butter, and 
talks in an apologetic strain of the cheese made from the milk of cows, 
— " il loro latte e cascio assai si confa alluso de I' huomo, advenga che 
ncn sia ccsi buono comp quollo de la pecora." Lib. IX. cap. lx%n. 



CONRAD HE RES BACH. 107 

no earlier one : — "Of milke is made Butter, whose use 
(though chiefely at this day among the Flemings) is 
yet a good & profitable foode in other countries, «fc 
much used of our old Fathers, yea even of the veiy 
Patriarches (as the Scriptures witnesseth). The com- 
moditie thereof besides many other, is the asswaging of 
hunger, &, the preserving of strength : it is made in 
this sorte. The Milke, as soone as it is milked, is put 
out of the Paile into Bowles or Pannes, the best are 
earthen Pannes, & those rather broad than deepe : 
this done, the second or the third day, the creame that 
swimmes aloft is fleeted off, & put into a vessel rather 
deepe than big, round & cilinder fashion : although in 
other places they have other kind of Charmes, low & 
flat, wherein with often beating & moving up & downe, 
they so shake the milke, as they sever the thinnest 
l^art off from the thicke, which at the first, gathers to- 
gether in little crombles, & after with the continuance 
of the violent moving, commeth to a whole wedge 
or cake : thus it is taken out & either eaten fresh, or 
barrelled with salt." 

I have before me two editions of this old work : the 
first of Barnaby Googe, published in 1614, and the 
second newly compiled with additions by Captaine 
Garvase Markhame, and bearing date of 1601. From 
this we may infer that the book had considerable popu- 
larity in England ; and it is curious to observe how the 



108 WJ^T DAYS. 

gallant Captain has filed away many of the religious 
reflections of Heresbach or of Googe, and introduced 
such addenda as show him to have been a high liver 
and an ardent sportsman. Thus when Barnaby has 
brought to an end his pleasant talk about the vine, the 
Captain adds this rule for giving an aromatic fla\or 
to the grape. " You shall take," he says, " Damask 
i*ose water & boyle therein the powder of cloaves, cin- 
amon, three graines of Amber & one of Muske, & 
when it is come to be somewhat thicke, take a round 
gouge & make an hole on the maine stocke of the 
Vine, full as deepe as the heart, & then put therein 
the medicine, stopping the hole with Cypress or Juniper, 
&, the next Grapes which shall spring out of the vine 
will taste as if they were perfumed." 

Again, Barnaby closes his discourse of " Hennes " 
with a pleasant allusion to that " Christian Gentlewom- 
an of milde & sweet disposition, the Ladie Hales of 
Kent," who used to make capons of her turkey-cocks : 
the ungallant Captain di'ops the compliment to the 
Ladie Hales, and gives us three or four pages upon 
cock-fighting ; " for my owne part," says he, " I doe not 
finde (in this Kingdome of ours) any monument of 
pleasure whatsoever more ancient than the cock-pit." 

Upon the last page of the book are some rules for 
purchasing land, which I suspect are to be attributed 
to the poet of Lincolnshire, rather than to Heresbach. 



CONRAD HERESBACH. 100 

They are as good as they were then ; and the poetry 
none the worse : — 

" First see that the land be clear 
In title of the seller ; 
And that it stand in danger 
Of no woman's dowrie; 
See whether the tenure be bond or free, 
And release of every fee of fee ; 
See that the seller be of age, 
And that it lie not in mortgage ; 
Whether ataile be thereof found, 
And whether it stand in statute bound ; 
Consider what service longeth thereto, 
And what quit rent thereout must goe ; 
And if it become of a wedded woman, 
Think thou then on covert baron ; 
And if thou may in any wise. 
Make thy charter in warrantise, 
To thee, thine heyres, assignes also; 
Thus should a wise purchaser doe." 

The learned Lipsius was a contemporary and a not 
far-off neighbor of Councillor Heresbach ; and although 
his orthodoxy was somewhat questionable, and his Cal- 
vinism somewhat stretchy, there can be no doubt of the 
honest rural love which belongs to some of his letters, 
and especially to this smack of verse (I dare not say 
poetry) with which he closes his Eighth ( Cent. I.) : — 

" Vitam si liceat mihi 

Fonnare arbitriis meis : 

Non fasces cupiam aut opes, 

Non clarus niveis equis 



110 WET DAYS. 

Captiva agmina traxerim. 

In solis habitem locis, 
Hortos possideam atque agros, 
lUic ad strepitus aquae 
Musarum studiis fruar. 

Sic cum fata mihi ultima 
Pernerit Lachesis mea ; 
Tranquillus moriar senex." 

I have ventured to English it in this way : — 

Were it given to me to choose 
The life that I would live, 
No honors I 'd ask, no gold, 
No car with snoivy steeds 
Trailing its captive bands. 
In lonely places I 'd live 
With gardens and fields my own. 
There, to the munnur of streams, 
Of poets I 'd drink my fill. 
So, when at the last Lachesis 
Should clip the fateful thread, 
She 'd find me waiting and willing, 
An old man tranquilly dead. 



La Maison Rustique, 

I PASS over the Rhine — using books for stepping- 
stones — into the French territory. In the pleasant 
country of the Ardeche, at the little town of Villeneuve- 
le-Berg, — a half-day's ride away from the Rhone bank 
and but a little farther from the famous vineyard of the 
Hennitage, — there is a monument to the memory of 



LA MAISON RUSTIQUE. Ill 

Olivier de Serres, who is fondly called the Father of 
French agriculture, and who is specially honored be- 
cause he first introduced the culture of the mulberry 
and the rearing of silk-worms. Every peasant of that 
region feels a debt of gratitude to him, which he ac- 
knowledges by the pride he entertains in his monument 
of Villeneuve-le-Berg. The French have a delight- 
fully open-hearted way of declaring their allegiance to 
their benefactors, and of setting up memorials to them. 
It is true they take on a frenzy every century or two of 
ripping open the tombs of kings, or emperors, — even 
of such as their darling Henri Quatre, — and sowing 
their ashes broadcast. But there are some memories 
they cherish imflinchingly, and some monuments they 
will always guard : that of Olivier de Serres is one of 
them. He enjoyed in his latter years the special pat- 
ronage of Henri IV., and his great work, " Theatre 
d' Agriculture," may be reckoned the first considerable 
contribution to the literature of the subject in France. 

At about the same period, Charles Estienne, brother 
of the famous printer, and himself a printer and physi- 
cian, wrote largely on rural subjects, collecting his vari- 
ous treatises finally under the name of " Przedium Rus- 
ticum," which he afterw^ard translated into French, and 
called " La Maison Rustique." The work was largely 
added to by Liebault, his son-in-law; and, with such 
successive improvements and emendations, year after 



112 WET DAYS. 

year, as have almost buried the original, it has come 
fairly down to our own day, and is thought a neces- 
sary purchase by every country-gentleman in France. 

I have before me now an old English edition of the 
book, dated 1616, translated by Eichard Surflet and 
" newly Reviewed, Corrected and Augmented, with di- 
vers large additions," by our friend Garvase Markham. 
A great many absiu-d fables are told in it with a cm-ious 
air of gravity ; thus if a farmer would know the price of 
corn, he says, " Let him chuse out at adventure twelve 
graines of Corne the first day of Januarie, let him 
make cleane the fire-IIarth, and kindle a fire there- 
upon ; afterward let him call some boy or girle of his 
neighbors, or of his owne house, let him command the 
partie to put one of these graines upon the Harth, 
made verie cleane and hot : then bee shall marke if the 
said graine do leape or lye still : if it leaj^e a little, then 
corne shall be reasonably cheape ; but if it leape verie 
much it shall be verie cheape ; if it leape toward the 
fire more or lesse, corne shall be more or lesse deare ; 
if it lye still and leape not, then Corne shall stand at 
one price for this first moneth." 

I wish that our modern speculators in bread-stuffs 
were capable of formularies as innocent ; but I fear their 
motives of sale or purchase are warmed by a hotter fire 
than belongs to any earthly hearth-stone. Liebault, 
being a physician, mingles a great deal of medical ad- 



LA MAISON RUSTIQUE. 113 

vice with the agricultural. Thus he suggests to us a 
certain familiar remedy for an old style of headache, in 
this fashion : — "If the Head complaine itselfe of too 
much Drinke, there may be made a Frontlet with wild 
Time, Maiden-haire, and Roses ; or else to drinke of 
the shavings of Hartshorne, with Fountaine or River 
water : or if you see that your stomacke be not sicke, 
thou mayst take of the haire of the Beast that hath 
made thee ill, and drinke off a good glasse of Wine." 
Again, where he talks of pine-trees he says, (and 
modern practitioners will agree with him in this also,) 
" such as ha\e weake lungs, must goe a taking of the 
ayre into the pine Forests." He tells us that an apple 
grafted upon the pear will produce the fruit called 
" pearmains," and if they be grafted on quinces, " you 
shall have Paradise apples." But on the other hand, 
he questions the old stories of promiscuous grafting, 
and insists that rosin-bearing trees cannot be grafted. 
To have great cherries, he says, " you must often break 
the cherry tree," — a notion which has its confirmation 
in the modern practice of heading in old trees for the 
sake of producing fresh-bearing wood. He advises 
mulching, and constant tillage of both orcharding and 
vines. He urges the winter foddering of cattle from 
stacks about the meadows, in order to secure a proper 
distribution of the manure, — a slovenly practice for 
which too many New-England farmers will be glad to 
8 



114 WET DAYS. 

find a res]5€ctable authority, although it be some three 
centuries old. Any distribution is, it is true, better 
than none ; but the waste on the score of food, of fat, 
and of manure, is by far too great to warrant any en- 
couragement of the system. 

The reader may be interested in seeing some names 
of esteemed apples in that time, — such as Ruddocks, 
Rambur, Fairewife, Gastlet, Great-eye, Greening, Bar- 
barian, and among special favorites were Shortstart, 
Honiemeale, and Garden-globe. Liebault is moreover 
the first, I believe, to introduce to the European public 
some of the mysteries of the tobacco-plant. It was 
quite new in his day, and had been brought, he tells us, 
by the captain of a ship ti'ading with the Floridas. Out 
of respect to Master John Nicot, he urges that it be 
called Nicotiana ; and he enumerates some dozen or 
more of diseases and aches which it will infallibly cure, 
while he sums up the testimony thereto with as pretty a 
grace and as loud assurance as Dr. Brandreth could 
command. I venture to introduce his description of 
one curative method which is entertained kindly by a 
few old-fashioned persons even now : — 

" If you take of the best Tabacco or Nicotiana, and 
twine it very hard as you can together, then with a knife 
shred it very small and spreading it upon a cleane sheet 
of paper, drie it over a gentle fire made of charcoale, 
then when it is cold you shall put it into a Tabacco pipe 



FRENCH RURALISMS. 115 

that is verie cleane or new burnt (the figure thereof is 
needless to relate, because the world is so much en- 
chanted therewith, that not anything whatever is halfe 
so common as this is now a dales) and having stopt it 
hard into the pipe, you shall with a Wax candle, or other 
sweet flame, set it on fire, and then sucking and drawing 
the Smoake into your mouth, you shall force the fume 
forth at your nostrills, which fume will (if the head be 
well covered) make that you shall avoid at the mouth 
such qviantitie of slimy and flegmatick water, as that 
your body will thereby become leane, as if you had 
fasted long: by which one may conjecture that the 
dropsie not confirmed may be holpen by taking the 
same fume : the same fume taken at the mouth is singu- 
lar good for them tbat have a short breath, old cough, 
or rheumes." 

Had Dr. Liebault been a nurseryman and lived at 
Brooklyn or Rochester, I should have suspected him 
of having a " limited number of fine stocky plants " of 
this valuable herb for sale. 

French Ruralisms. 

DO not find much among the older French writers 
to stimulate one who is agriculturally, or even pas- 
torally inclined. They hold their places on the shelves 
of a country-library, like city-guests at a country-table. 



116 WET DAYS. 

They overbear one with the grand air they carry. No 
homely sounds chime with the chatter of them. The 
truth is, the French do not love the country ; a mouldy 
chateau with extinguisher-turrets lifting above a copse 
of poplars, which is set all astir in October with a little 
coterie of Parisians who bang at the birds, (without 
much harming them,) and play piquet, and talk of 
Paris, — this is their measure of country-delights. Or 
if a little more of sentiment is grafted upon the fancy, 
there must be bright copper casseroles in the kitchen, 
maids in short skirts, a dance under the trees, peasant 
hats and sashes, a tame lamb in ribbons, pictures by 
Watelet in the salon, — all which is met and enjoyed 
as they sit out a play at the theatre, which being over, 
— " allons done I " — they flock home to the city. 

A great Frenchman will sometimes go to the coun- 
try to die, but never to live. Voltaire would have been 
miserable at Ferney without his little court of admirers 
trailing out from Geneva ; he planted himself there on 
the verge of two States only that he might escape the 
possible persecution of either ; he contrived his chateau 
for the best housing of his adulators and of his gilt 
coach, rather than for any views it might give of Lake 
Leman and Mont Blanc : his favorite walk Avas a her- 
ceau - avenue of cHi3ped hornbeams, still vigorous in 
their ugliness, and alloAving only rare glimpses of the 
wonderful vision of lake and mountain toward Geneva. 



FRENCH RURAL! SMS. 117 

I am sure that he loved the patter of the little feet of 
his feminine idolaters upon the gravel-path better than 
any bird-song, or any echo of thunder from the wooded 
heights of the Jura. There is no trace of natural 
scenery in the " Henriade " ; and as for the " Pucelle," 
there is not in all its weary length so much as a fig-leaf 
to cover its indecencies. 

If he plants the borders of his fields, it is with a view 
to revenue ; his keen eye never lost sight of that. He 
ridicules a French author who had talked of a gain in 
agriculture of one hundred per cent. : " five hundred," 
says Voltaire, " wotild not be too much " ; and then, 
with a sardonic grin, — " Heureux Parisiens, jouissez 
de nos travaux, etjugez de V Opera Comique I " 

He speaks on one occasion of the restoration of 
sterile lands, and says the only feasible way is " to trans- 
port good earth to them ; this, repeated year after year, 
added to manure, may make them fertile " ; and he adds, 
" none but a rich man could imdertake this," — an ob- 
servation which is entirely sound. 

Again he says if cavalry are camped on such ground 
a sufficient length of time, it may be redeemed.* The 
English indeed hurdle sheei") for purposes of fertiliza- 
tion, but could any save a Frenchman ever have sug- 
gested the idea of hurdling a squadron of cavalry ? 

* He adds to this extraordinary suggestion a no less extraordinary 
comment, — " Cttte. depenst sefesant dans le royaume, il n^y auraiipas 
un denier de perdu.''' 



118 WET DAYS. 

If any ripe outburst of rural feeling were to be 
counted upon for a surety in any of the older French 
authors, one might, it would seem, reasonably look for it 
in the books of the many-sided, jovial, philosophic, in- 
dolent Montaigne. He was born and lived in Gascony, 
with a fine, flowing landscape under his eye ; he hated 
cities ; he hated crowds ; he hated politics ; he hated 
war. He travelled widely and wherever his humor led 
him ; his eye was as keen as a falcon's ; he reported 
upon all possible relations of man to man ; he wrote of 
Fear, and Custom, and Death, and Idleness, and Can- 
nibals, and I know not what besides : but of trees or 
rivers or vineyards or mountains he is as silent as if he 
had never seen them. 

He neither wishes to build, nor loves field-sports nor 
gardens, nor " other such pleasures " * of a country -life. 
He has no special attachment for his paternal castle : 
"If I feared much to die away from it," he says, "I 
should never go abroad ; for I feel death always press- 
ing at my reins. It is all one to me where I die. If I 
could choose, I think it would be rather on horseback 
than in my bed." 

Boileau, whose name — Despreaux — is suggestive 
of the meadows, is utterly incapable of any touch that 
quickens one's memory of either fields or stream. He 

* " N'y ce plaisir de bastir, qu'on dit estre si attaiyant, n'y la 
chasse, n'y les Javdins, n'y ces autres plaisirs de la vie retiree, ne me 
peuveiit beaucoiip amuser." — Liv. III. cap. 9. 



FRENCH RURALISMS. 119 

wrote, indeed, a poetic epistle to his gardener, (XI.) ; 
but with the substitution of a curry-comb for the spade, 
it might have been addressed to his hostler. The epis- 
tle may very likely have been suggested by one of 
Horace, Ad Siium Villicum ; but they are widely un- 
like. Under all of the Roman poet's pleasant banter 
of his bailiff, you see a yearning for the freshness and 
freedom of his farm-life. He admits his old dissipation 
and the long nights he has made of it with the " covet- 
ous Cynara " ; but now he only asks short suppers, and 
long sleep on some grassy river-bank, — 

" Cena brevis juvat, et prope rivurn somiiiis in herba." 

Boileau, on the other hand, has no loves to confess, but 
muddles and confounds his gardener with a story of 
the immense strain upon the mind which his poetic 
labors involve. 

Madame de Sevigne wrote most charmingly ; and one 
would have supposed that on her visits to her old and 
beautiful home in Brittany her epistles would have 
caught something of the color of the country, and 
that she would delight in conveying to her daughter in 
Provence glimpses of the Breton peasants, and some of 
the perfume of the Breton gardens and of the Breton 
pine woods : but no ; her letters from her chateau of 
Les Rochers are as flashingly Parisian and as salon- 
bound as if they had been written imder the shadow 
of Notre Dame. Lady Wortley Montagu would haxe 



120 WET DAYS. 

written a different style -of letter from a country-house 
in Brittany; but — que voiilez-vous? — the Sevigne was a 
FrencliAvoman. 

Felton in his " Portraits," * a pleasant, but slipshod 
book, takes occasion in his opening chapter to claim 
both Sevigne and Boileau as intense lovers of garden- 
ing, of which he says their writings give proof I can- 
not find the evidence. The Lamoignon letter of Boi- 
leau (Epist. VL) has no unction in its rural allusions ; 
its peasant cottages are dug out of a cliff of sandstone, 
and the poet regales himself with the delights of Au- 
teuil chiefly because he escapes there the abusive talk 
of the city. Mme. Sevigne's warmest picture of a gar- 
den is of one where she passed an evening, at the 
Hotel de Conde, (IGth July, 1677) : — " There were 
jets-d'eaux, cabinets, terraced walks, six hauthois in 
one corner, six violins in another, a little nearer six 
delightful flutes, a supper that appeared by enchant- 
ment, an admirable bass-viol, and over all — the moon- 
light." A true French garden ! 

Boileau made pretensions, it is true, in his Lamoignon 
epistle ; but Bossuet was honester, — so honest that his 
gardener said to him, " Si je plantais des St. Augus- 
tins et des St. Chrysostomes, vous les viendriez voir ; 
mais pour vos arbres, vous ne vous en souciez guere." 

* On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening. By S. Felton. 
London, 1830. 8vo. 



FRENCH RURALISMS. 121 

If Rousseau be any exception to what I have said, he 
is at the least a Swiss exception. An exceptional man, 
indeed, he was in every way, — so full of genius, so 
imbruted by vanity, so ignobly selfish, so masterful in 
the inthralment of all sensitive minds by the binding, 
glittering meshes of his talk. Keenly apprehensive 
of beauty, whatever form it might take, this man must 
have enjoyed the garden-experience near to Chambery, 
under the tutelage of Mme. Warens ; yet he tells us 
very little about it The lady was disposed to be a. far- 
meress ; but Jean Jacques was looldng at the heavens, 
or busying himself with vain study of music. lie liad 
no practical talent, except for language. In his " Re- 
veries du Promeneur Solitaire" there are scattered 
little bits of rurality, quickened by his botanizing ; I 
may specially designate his descriptions of scenes upon 
the isle of St. Pierre, in the Lake of Brienne. And in 
the " Nouvelle Heloise " (Part 4, Let. XL) there is a 
most charming picture of a garden-wilderness, which 
those gentlemen who have lands upon their hand, and 
who are fettered by the ordinary rules of the gardeners, 
might read to their profit. It is a sweet sylvan tangle 
of beauties, amid which birds are singing and rills are 
flowing. I Avill not venture upon any translation.* 

* " Dans les lieux plus decouverts je voyais 9a et la, sans ordre et 
Bans sym^trie, des broussaiUes de roses, de framboisiers, de groseilles, 
des fourr^s de lilas, de noisetier, de sureau, de seringat, de genet, de 
trifolium, qui paraient la tejre en liii donn^nt I'air d'eti£ en friche. 



122 WET DAYS. 

In his " Confessions " he says, — " It was in the midst 
of the Park of Montmorenci, in that profound and 
delicious solitude, with woods around me, and waters, 
and the songs of all birds, and the perfume of orange- 
blossoms, that I composed, in a continued ecstasy, the 
fifth book of ' Emile ' ; and its fresh coloring is due in a 
large degree to the locality where I wrote." 

It is a frank admission from one in whom frank- 
ness was perhaps the largest virtue. In that same 
fifth book there is a pleasant picture of Emile teach- 
ing the peasantry ; by way of diversion he shows them 
how to make a new sort of farm-wagon, and he surprises 
them all by taking in hand the plough and laying a 
straighter furrow than any of them could do. "VYhere- 
upon Rousseau says, (and I have heard kindred talk in 
the mouths of my neighbors,) — " lis ne se moquent pas 

Je suivais des allies tortueuses et irr^guli^res bord^es de ces bocages 
fleiiris, et couvertes de mille guirlandes de vigne de Judee, de vigne- 
vierge, de houblon, de liseron, de coiileuvr(?e, de ck'matite, et d'aiitres 
plantes de cette espece, parmi lesquelles le chevre-feuille et le jasmin 
daignaient se confondre. Ces giiirlaudes semblaient jet(^'es n(''g]igem- 
ment d'lin arbre a I'autre, comme j'en avais remarqu6 quelquefois 
daiis les forets, et formaieut sur nous des esp^ces de draperies qui nous 
garantissaient du soleil, tandis que nous avions sous nos pieds iin mar- 
cher doux, commode, et sec, sur vme mousse fine, sans sable, sans herbe, 
et sans rejetons raboteux. Alors seulement je decouvrais, non sans 
surprise, que ces ombrages verds et touifus, qui m'en avaient taut im- 
pose de loin, n'etaient formes que de ces plantes rarapantes et parasites, 
qui, guid^es le long des arbres, envirounaient leur tetes du plus ^pais 
feuillage, et leurs pieds d'ombre et de fraicheur." I give a glimpse 
only at a scene which tills four full pages of Rousseau's best descrip- 
tive langiuige. 



FRENCH RURALISMS. 123 

de ltd comme d 'un beau diseur d'agriculture ; Us voient 
qiCil la salt en effet." 

I do not think it could ever have been said of Rous- 
seau. I can hardly imagine a man more poorly quali- 
fied for the masculine employments that belong to a 
continued and devoted country - life. His period of 
novitiate at the Chaumettes, where he lived in the 
silken leash of Mme. Warens, was no test. His bota- 
nizing was a casual habit ; and throughout all his seclu- 
sion, he was more occupied with the wonders of his own 
brain and his own passions, than with the wonders of 
Nature. Yet he painted Nature well, and wantoned 
in his power ; but his power was dearer to him than 
his subject. He never loved the forest, as Bernardin 
de St. Pierre loved the lusty verdure of the tropics. 

This latter, — Frenchman though he was, — when so 
poor that he could command only a garret in the fau- 
bourg, equipped his little window always with a pot of 
flowers ; and in " Paul and Virginia " he left a bouquet 
whose perfume is dear to all boys and girls, even now. 

Of the hundred and odd plays of Saintine we re- 
member, and care to remember, nothing ; but his Pic- 
ciola, struggling through the crevice of a prison-pave- 
ment, has, under his love and art, made its tender 
leaflets to flutter winningly in the eyes of all the 
world. 



124 WET DAYS. 

A Minnesinger. 

nnHE clouds are breaking. I began my day among 
-■- the Troubadours ; why not close it with a blithe 
song of a " Minnesinger " ? It is full of the forest- 
freshness of the North ; there is in it no Southern clang 
of battle. It clears the air ; it mocks at gloom ; it 
beckons to a ramble upon the green shores of England. 

" May, sweet May, again is come, — 
May, that frees the land from gloom. 
Children, children, up and see 
All her stores of jollity! 
O'er the laughing hedge-rows' side 
She hath spread her treasures wide ; 
She is in the greenwood shade. 
Where the nightingale hath made 
Every branch and every tree 
Ring with her sweet melody : 
Hill and dale are May's own treasures, 
Youth, rejoice in sportive measures; 
Sing ye! join the choi-us gay! 
Hail this merry, merrj' May ! 

" Up, then, children, we will go 
Where the blooming roses grow; 
In a joyful company 
We the bursting flowers will see ; 
Up ! your festal dress prepare ! 
Where gay hearts are meeting, there 
May lialh pleasures most in%'iting. 
Heart and sight and ear delighting: 



A MINNESINGER. 125 

Listen to the birds' sweet song, 
Hark ! how soft it floats along ! 
Courtly dames our pleasures share, 
Never saw I May so fair ; 
Therefore dancing will we go ; 
Youths, rejoice, the flowxets blow; 

Sing ye ! join the chorus gay ! 

Hail this merry, meny May! " * 

* Attributed to Earl Conrad of Kkchberg, and cited by Roscoe in 
his notes to Sismondi's Literature of Europe. 



FOURTH DAY. 



Piers Plowman. 

A SMART little couplet of volumes from Soho 
Square, London, bears me away from the murky 
November sky that confronts me out-of-doors, to 

" a May morwenynge 
On Malveme hilles." * 

And there Piers Plowman shall lay open for me the 
first farm-furrow upon English soil. For want of bet- 
ter, we may count him the type of a British farmer 
in the reign of Edward III., — those famous days of 
Crecy and of Poictiers. It is true that the allusions to 
field-culture in the book are only incidental ; but it is 
something that the author of the old verse made a 
ploughman his preacher, by which we may infer that the 
craft was held in respect by the people ; there are also 
certain indications of the modes of country-life and of 
farm-fare which I hope to bring into view. 

* The Vision and Creed of Piers Plowman: (edited by Thomas 
Wright:) an allegorical poem of about the middle of the fourteentli 
cenfury, by Langlande ( ?)an English monk. 



PIERS PLOWMAN. 127 

Piers one day falls asleep on Malveni Hills, and has 
a vision. The whole world is gathered in a meadow. 
Piers looks on at King, knights, ladies, and hirelings, and 
sees by-and-by Lady Church come among them with 
her godly talk ; but Lady Mammon (Mede) finds more 
listeners, and, at the instigation of the lawyers, a mar- 
riage is set on foot between Mammon and Falsehood. 
Conscience breaks up the match, whereuiDon the King, 
who has a regard for Mammon, advises that she marry 
Conscience. But Conscience objects that the lady's rep- 
utation is bad ; whereat they fall into a wrangle, and the 
King commands them to kiss and be friends. Conscience 
says he '' would die first," and appeals to Reason, who 
comes and brings Peace. This delights the King, and 
Reason is in great favor and commences preaching ; and 
the " field full of folk," all listening, want to fin^ their 
way to the Tower of Truth. But they boggle on the 
road. Piers Plowman knows it, and says if they will 
wait till he has ploughed a half-acre on the highway, 
he will guide them. 

" Now is Perkyn and his pilgrim * 
To the plow faren : 
Dikers and delvers 
Digged up the ridges : 
Other workmen there were 
That wroughten full well; 

* I have ventured to modernize the language somewhat, though 
preser\Mng so far as possible the peculiar alliterative construction, and 
Lhe rhythm. 



128 WET DAYS. 

Each man in his manner 
Made up his task, 
And some to please Perkyn 
Piked up the weeds. 
At high prime Piers 
Let the plow stand 
To oversee for himself, 
Whoso had best wrought, 
And whom he should hire 
"When harvesting came. 
And some were a-sitting 
A-singing at the ale, 
Helping till the half land 
With ' High, trolly-lolly ! ' " 

And Piers swears at them, — as later farmers have 

done, — " by the peril of his soul." But the lazy folk are 

full of all manner of excuses, to which Piers will not 

listen, but berates them the more. Whereat one called 

the " Waster " grows wrathy, and bids Perkyn " ' go 

hang' with his plow." 

" Will j'ou or won't you. 
We '11 have our will 
Of your flour and your flesh. 
Fish when we like ; 
And make merry therewith, 
Mauger yom* cheeks." 

Piers in a stout passion summons Himger to his aid, 
who straightway pinches Waster by the stomach till 
his eyes water, (" bothe hise eiyhen xvatrede^''^ and buffets 
him about the cheeks so that he looked like a lantern 



PIERS PLOWMAN. 129 

" all his life after." At this all his brother-sluggards 
rushed into the barn, and " flapped on with flails " from 
morning till night. 

The Plowman prays Hunger, who has served him 
so good a turn, to go home with him ; and Hunger dis- 
courses on the way from Bible texts, improvingly, coun- 
selling moderation in eating and drinking, and giving a 
pleasant rap at the doctors : — 

" For murderous are many Leeches 
Lord, amend their ways ! 
With all their drugs, they bring men death 
Ere Destiny would do 't.'' 

At last Piers asks Hunger to leave him ; but Hunger 
must have his dinner before he goes, and this gives us 
a hint of farmers' fare in 1370 : — 

" I have no penny, quoth Piers 
Pullets to buy ; 
I have no geese nor grunters, 
But green cheeses two, 
A few small curds and cream, 
Cake of oaten meal, 
I have two loaves of bean and bran 
Bak^d for my folk, 
And I have parselcy and porettes, 
And plants eno' of cole, 
And eke a cow and a calf. 
And a cart mare 
To draw a-field my dung. 
The while the drought lastcth." 
9 



130 WET DAYS. 

The Farmer of Chaucer^ s Time. 
QITTING thus, with the poem of Piers Plowman 
^^ in my hand, and the dashing Lady Mede making 
rainbows in my thought, (as she does for us poor mor- 
tals alway,) I wonder what a country-life would have 
been in those royal days of England which just pre- 
ceded the bloody times of the " Roses," — when the 
gallantry of the Black Prince was a toast with gallant 
men everywhere, — when the Gloucestershire monks 
made the " touchingest " wine in England, — when 
Venetian ships brought silks for wives who could wear 
them, — when ploughmen wore serge and blankets, and 
drank the " nattiest " of ale, — and when Chaucer 
made tales like honey. 

I suppose that a country - gentleman of moderate 
means in those times would have lived in a cumbrous, 
low house, built of oaken timber filled in with mortar, 
or flint stones, (if they were near him,) with a great hall 
for its principal apartment, hung around with flitches 
of venison, and with a rude chimney-place where half 
a sheep was roasted at a time upon a wooden spit. 

I suppose that he would have taught his boys prac- 
tice with the strong-bow, and that his girls would tease 
him for some bit of jewelry brought over by the 
Genoese ships. I am sure that wheaten bread was a 
rarity, and that his hirelings got only that made from 



THE FARMER OF CHAUCER'S TIME. 131 

barley, or, what was cheaper, peas and beans. I suspect 
a cask of ale was always on tap, and that the farmer 
was sometimes drunken — of the forenoon. If he 
lived in Cornwall, he would send his " doung carts " to 
the shore for sea-sand to dress his wheat-crop ; and if 
he were near some monastery, the monks might send 
him now and then a stoop of their wine, or come from 
time to time to read to his women-folk, out of Piers 
Plowman, (if they were radical,) or out of Chaucer, 
(if they were conservative) ; but I suspect that the 
country-gentleman would listen to neither, — leaving 
that bit of hospitality to the girls, — and would fall 
asleep upon his oaken settle, and dream, and make 
sounds through his nose, — 

" As though he saidest aye — Sampsoun ! Sampsoun ! " 

He must have had great stock of colewort and 
parsley and leeks * in his garden, and, if an epicure, 
may have boasted a bed of cucumbers. He would 
have a drove of hogs, of course, which wandered very 
much where it willed, under the guidance of some 
hireling, who, if he had dropped the neck-collar of 
Wamba, wore a jerkin every way as rough, a staff 
with a sharp pike in its end, and his hair " yshorne 
round by his eres." 

* Hume says it was not until the end of the reign of Ilenrj- VIII. 
that any " edible roots" were produced in England; but this is abun. 
dantly disproved by Piers Plowman's talk. 



132 WET DAYS. 

And if such a country-gentleman boasted a bailiff 
to oversee his farm-lands, he was very likely such 
another as Chaucer has painted in the Reve : — 

" a slendre colerike man, 
His berd was shave as nigh as ever he can. 
Fill long were his legges, and fill lene, 
Ylike a staff there was no calf ysene. 
Wei collide he kape a garner and a binne ; 
There was not auditour coude on him winne. 
Wei wiste he by the drought and by the rain, 
The yelding of his seed and of his grain." 

Of all things, such a landholder must have dreaded 
most the visit of some distinguished dignitary of the 
Church, who travelled with some four hundred in his 
train, treading down all his grain-crops, and his home- 
close, robbing his larder, and killing off the fattest of 
his bucks and of his wethers ; and whatever promises 
an archbishop might make of the new "graffes" he 
would send him, or some manuscript copy of Crescenzi, 
or of Columella, I think he must have been glad to see 
the palfrey of his Reverence go ambling out of his farm- 
yard.* The farm - implements of such a landholder 
must have been very cumbrous ; I doubt if the ploughs 
had improved much upon that ill-shapen affair with one 
wheel, whose picture has come down \o us in the Cal- 

* I have endeavored to make this portrait historically true, and 
am indebted for its several particulars to Malmesbiuy, Langlande, 
Chaucer, Mathew Paris, Holinshed, Latimer, and Macpherson'a "An- 
nals of Commerce."' 



THE FARMER OF CHAUCER'S TIME. 133 

endar of the Cotton MSS.* Quick-witted men, even 
if they were dwellers in the country, took more pride in 
a good pack of hounds than in a good array of farm- 
tools ; and we inherit much of the same barbarism in 
these days, when some runt of a fast trotter is sure to 
carry away all the honors and all the applause from our 
best cattle-shows. 

I do not suppose that a British farmer of the four- 
teenth century would have cared much for gardening, 
beyond his patch of colewort, parsley, and onions ; and 
the larger landholders, who boasted baronial titles, would 
hardly have ventured to place any rare things of fruit 
or flower outside their battleniented walls or moat. 
The priors and the abbots were the men most success- 
ful with the vineyards and orcharding : they reaped the 
good things of life in those days : town-boys did not 
venture over the walls of a priory to steal pippins ; and 
in the herbary of the " Nonnes Priestes Tale " there is 
enumeration of such a stock of herbs that the very read- 
ing of it is savory with tincture of rhubarb. 

Henry I. long before this had his park and his laby- 
rinth at "Woodstock, of which the deepest trace left is 
the tragic memory of Fair Rosamond. And if parks, 
then surely flowers, — if not in gardens, at least in the 
pages of the poets, where henceforth I may gather 
them as I list, to garnish this wet-day talk. At the 

* Strutt. 



134 WET DAYS. 

bare thought of them, I seem to hear the royal cap- 
tive James pouring madrigals through the window of his 
Windsor prison, — 

" the hymnis consecrat 
Of lovis use, now soft, now loud among, 
That all the gardens and the wallis rung." 

And through the " Dreme " of Chaucer I seem to see 
the great plain of Woodstock stretching away under 
my view, all white and green, — "green y-powdered 
with daisy." Upon the half-ploughed land, lying yonder 
veiled so tenderly with the mist and the rain, I could 
take oath to the very spot where five hundred years 
ago the ploughman of Chaucer, all " forswat," 

" plucked up his plowB 
Whan midsomer mone was comen in 
And shoke off shear, and coulter off drowe, 
And honged his harnis on a pinne, 
And said his beasts should ete enowe 
And lie in grasse up to the chin." ' 

With due respect for the poet, it would be bad hus- 
bandry to allow cattle steaming from the plough to lie 
down in grass of that height.^ 



Sir Anthony Fitz-herhert. 

Q1IR ANTHONY FITZ-HERBERT, who died in 
^^ 1538, is the first duly accredited writer on British 
husbandry. There are some few earlier ones, it is true, 



SIR ANTHONY FITZ-HERBERT. 135 

— a certain " Mayster Groshede, Bysshop of Lyncoln," 
and a Henri Calcoensis, among them. Indeed, Mr. 
Donaldson, who has compiled a bibliography of Brit- 
ish farm-writers, and who once threatened a poem on 
kindred subjects, has the effrontery to include Lord 
Littleton. I have a respect for Lord Littleton, and for 
Coke on Littleton, but it is tempered with some early 
experiences in a lawyer's office, and some later experi- 
ences of the legal profession ; and however well he 
may have written upon " Tenures," I do not feel dis- 
posed to admit him to the present galaxy. 

It is worthy of remark, in view of the mixed com- 
plexion which I have given to these wet-day studies, 
that the oldest printed copy of that sweet ballad of the 
" Nut Browne Mayde " has come to us in a Chronicle of 
1.503, which contains also a chapter upon " the crafte 
of graffynge & plantynge & alterynge of fruyts." What 
could be happier than the conjunction of the knight of 
" the grenwode tree " with a good chapter on " graf- 
fynge"? 

Fitz-herbert's work is entitled a " Boke of Husband- 
rie," and counts, among other headings of discourse, 
the following : — 

" Whether is better a plough of hoi*ses or a plough 
of oxen." 

" To cary out dounge & mucke, & to spreade it." 

" The fyrste furryng of the falowes." 



136 WET DAYS. 

" To make a ewe to love hir lambe." 
" To bye lean cattel." 

" A shorte information for a young gentyleman that 
entendeth to thryve." 

" What the wyfe oughte to dooe generally." 
(seq.) " To kepe measure in spendynge." 
" "What be God's commandments." 
" What joyes & pleasures are in heaven." 
" A meane to put away ydle thoughts in praing." 
At the close of his book he says, — " Thus endeth 
the ryghte profitable Boke of Husbandrye, compyled 
sometyme by Mayster Fitzherbarde, of charitee and 
good zele that he have to the weale of this most noble 
realme, which he did not in his youth, but after he 
had exercised husbandrye, with greate experience, forty 
years." 

By all this it may be seen that Sir Anthony took as 
broad a view of husbandry as did Xenophon. 

Among other advices to the " young gentyleman that 
entendeth to thryve " he counsels him to rise betime in 
the morning, and if " he fynde any horses, mares, swyne, 
shepe, beastes in his pastures that be not his own ; or 
fynde a gap in his hedge, or any water standynge in his 
pasture uppon his grasse, whereby he may take double 
herte, bothe losse of his grasse, & rotting of his shepe, 
& calves ; or if he fyndeth or seeth anything that is 
amisse, & wold be amended, let him take out his tables 



SIR ANTHONY FITZ-HERBERT. 137 

& wryte the defautes ; & when he commeth home to 
dinner, supper, or at nyght, then let him call his bayley, 
& soo shewe him the defautes. For this," says he, 
" used I to doo x or xi yeres or more ; & yf he cannot 
wryte, lette him nycke the defautes uppon a stycke." 

Sir Anthony is gracious to the wife, but he is not 
tender ; and it may be encouraging to country-house- 
wives nowadays to see what service was expected of 
their mothers in the days of Henry VIII. 

"It is a wives occupacion to winow al maner of 
comes, to make malte, wash & wring, to make hey, to 
shere come, &. in time of neede to helpe her husbande 
to fyll the mucke wayne or donge carte, dryve the 
plough, to lode hay come & such other. Also to go or 
ride to the market to sell butter, chese, mylke, egges, 
chekens, kapons, hennes, pygges, gees «fe al maner 
of corne. And also to bye al maner of necessary 
thinges belonging to a household, & to make a true 
rekening & accompt to her husband what she hath 
receyved & what she hathe payed. And yf the husband 
go to market to bye or sell as they ofte do, he then to 
shew his wife in lyke maner. For if one of them should 
use to disceive the other, he disceyveth himselfe, & he 
is not lyke to thryve, & therfore they must be true 
ether to other. 

" I could peradventure shew the husbande of divers 
pointes that the wives disceve their husbandes in, & 



138 WET DAYS. 

in like maner howe husbandes disceve their wives. But 
yf I should do so, I shuld shew mo subtil pointes of 
disceite then either of them knew of before ; & there- 
fore me semeth best to holde my peace." 

His knowledge on these latter points will be ex- 
plained when I say that this old agricultural worthy 
was also a lawyer and in large practice. It is not com- 
mon for one of his profession to discuss " What be God's 
commandments." He was buried where he was born, — 
upon the banks of the River Dove, at the little town of 
Norbury in Derbyshire. 

Thomas Tusser. 

T COME next to Master Tusser, — poet, farmer, 
chorister, vagabond, happily dead at last, and with 
a tomb whereon some wag wrote this : — 

" Tusser, they tell me, when thou wert alive, 
Thou teaching thrift, thyself could never thrive; 
So, like the whetstone, many men are wont 
To sharpen othei-s when themselves are blunt." 

I cannot help considering poor Tusser's example one 
of warning to all poetically inclined farmers. 

He was born at a little village in the County of 
Essex. Having a good voice, he came early in life to 
be installed as singer at Wallingford College; and 
showing here a great proficiency, he was shortly after 
impressed for the choir of St. Paul's Cathedral. After- 



THOMAS TUSSER. 139 

ward he was for some time at Eton, where he had the 
ill-luck to receive some fifty-four stripes for his short- 
comings in Latin ; thence he goes to Trinity College, 
Cambridge, where he lives " in clover." It appears 
that he had some connections at Court, through whose 
influence he was induced to go up to London, where he 
remained some ten years, — possibly as singer, — but 
finally left in great disgust at the vices of the town, and 
commenced as farmer in Suffolk, — 

" To moil and to toil 
With loss and pain, to little gain, 
To cram Sir Knave " ; — 

from which I fancy that he had a hard landlord, and 
but little sturdy resolution. Thence he goes to Ips- 
wich, or its neighborhood, with no better experience. 
Afterward we hear of him with a second wife at Dere- 
ham Abbey ; but his wife is young and sharp-tempered, 
and his landlord a screw : so he does not thrive here, 
but goes to Norwich and commences chorister again ; 
but presently takes another farm in Fairstead, Essex, 
where it would seem he eked out a support by collect- 
ing tithes for the parson. But he says, — 

" I spyed, if parson died, 
(All hope in vain,) to hope for gain 
I might go dance." 

Possibly he did go dance : he certainly left the tithe- 
business, and after settling in one more home, from 



140 WET DAYS. 

which he ran to escape the plague, we find him return- 
ed to London, to die, — where he was buried in the 
Poultry. 

What is specially remarkable about Tusser is his air 
of entire resignation amid all manner of vicissitudes : 
he does not seem to count his hardships either wonder- 
ful or intolerable or unmerited. He tells us of the 
thrashing he had at Eton, (fifty-four licks,) Avithout 
greatly impugning the head-master ; and his shiftless- 
ness in life makes us strongly suspect that he deserved 
it all. 

There are good points in his poem, showing close 
observation, good sense, and excellent judgment. His 
rules of farm-practice are entirely safe and judicious, 
and make one wonder how the man who could give 
such capital advice could make so capital a failure. In 
the secret lies all the philosophy of the difference be- 
tween knowledge and practice. The instance is not 
without its modern support : I have the honor of ac- 
quaintance with several gentlemen who lay down 
charming rules for successful husbandry, every time 
they pay the country a visit ; and yet even their poultry- 
account is always largely against the constipated hens. 

I give one or two specimens of Tusser's mode of 
preachment ; the first from his March's husbandry : — 

" Sow barley in March, in April, and May, 
The later in sand, and the sooner in clay. 



THOMAS TUSSER. 141 

What worser for barley than wetuess and cold ? 
What better to skilf id than time to be bold ? 

" Let barley be harrowed finely as dust, 
Then workmanly tiench it, and fence it ye must. 
This season well plied, set sowing an end, 
And praise and pray God a good harvest to send. 

" Some rolleth their barley straight after a rain. 
When first it appeareth, to level it plain ; 
The barley so used the better doth grow, 
And handsome ye make it, at harvest to mow. 

"At spring (for the smnmer) sow garden ye shall, 
At han'est (for winter) or sow not at all. 
Oft digging, removing, and weeding, ye see, 
Makes herb the more wholesome and greater to be." 

Again in his teaching for February he says, very 
shrewdly : — 

" Who slacketh his tillage a carter to be, 
For groat got abroad, at home lose shall three ; 
And so by his doing, he bnngs out of heart 
Both land for the com and horse for the cart. 

" Who abuseth his cattle, and starves them for meat, 
By carting or ploughing his gain is not great : 
Where he that with labor can use them aright, 
Hath gain to his comfort, and cattle in plight." 

Fuller, in his " Worthies," says Tusser " spread his 
bread with all sorts of butter, yet none would stick 
thereon." In short, though the poet wrote well on 



142 WET DAl^S. 

farm-practice, he certainly was not a good exemplar of 
farm-successes. With all his excellent notions about 
sowing and reaping, and rising with the lark, I should 
look for a little more of stirring mettle and of dogged 
resolution in a man to be recommended as a tenant. 
I cannot help thinking less of him as a farmer than as 
a kind-hearted poet ; too soft of the edge to cut very 
deeply into hard-pan, and too porous and flimsy of 
character for any compacted resolve : yet taking life 
tenderly, withal ; good to those poorer than himself 
making a rattling appeal for Christmas charities ; hos- 
pitable, cheerful, and looking always to the end with an 
honest clearness of vision : — 

" To death we must stoop, be we high, be we low, 
But how, and how suddenly, few be that know; 
What carry we, then, but a sheet to the grave, 
(To cover this carcass,) of all that we have? " 



Sir Hugh Piatt. 

QIR HUGH PLATT, who lived in the latter part of 
^^ the sixteenth century, is called by Mr. Weston in 
his catalogue of English authors, " the most ingenious 
husbandman of his age." He is elsewhere described as 
a gentleman of Lincoln's Inn, who had two estates in 
the country, besides a garden in St. INIartin's Lane. He 
was an enthusiast in agricultural, as well as horticul- 



SIR HUGH PL ATT. 143 

tural inquiries, corresponding largely with leading 
farmers, and conducting careful experiments within 
his own grounds. In speaking of that " rare and peer- 
less plant, the grape," he insists upon the wholesome- 
ness of the wines he made from his Bednall-Greene 
garden : " And if," he says, " any exception shold be 
taken against the race and delicacie of them, I am 
content to submit them to the censure of the best 
moiithes, that professe any true skill in the judgement 
of high country wines : although for their better credit 
herein, I could bring in the French Ambassador, who 
(now almost two yeeres since, comming to my house 
of purpose to tast these wines) gaue this sentence upon 
them : that he neuer drank any better new wine in 
France." 

I must confess to more doubt of the goodness of the 
wine than of the speech of the ambassador ; French 
ambassadors are always so complaisant ! 

Again he indulges us in the story of a pretty conceit 
whereby that " delicate Knight," Sir Francis Carew, 
proposed to astonish the Queen by a sight of a cherry- 
tree in full bearing, a month after the fruit had gone 
by in England. This secret he performed, by " strain- 
ing a Tent or couer of canuass ouer the whole tree, and 
wetting the same now and then with a scoope or home, 
as the heat of the weather required : and so, by with- 
olding the simne beams from reflecting upon the ber 



lit WET DAYS. 

ries, they grew both great, and were very long before 
they had gotten their perfect cherrie-colour : and when 
he was assured of her Majestie's comming, he remoued 
the Tent, and a few sunny daies brought them to their 
full maturities." 

These notices are to be found in his " Flores Para- 
dise." Another work, entitled " Dyiiers Soyles for 
manuring pasture and arable land," enumerates, in ad- 
dition to the usual odorous collection, such extraordi- 
narily new matters (in that day) as "salt, street-dirt, 
clay, Fullers earth, moorish earth, fern, hair, calcination 
of all vegetables, malt dust, soap - boilers ashes, and 
marie." But what I think particularly commends him to 
notice, and makes hun worthy to be enrolled among 
the pioneers, is his little tract upon " The Setting of 
Corne." * 

In this he anticipates the system of " dibbling " 
grain, which, notwithstanding, is spoken of by writers 
within half a century f as a new thing ; and which, it 
is needless to say, still prevails extensively in many 
parts of England. If the tract alluded to be indeed 
the work of Sir Hugh Piatt, it antedates very many of 
the suggestions and improvements which are usually 

* This is not mentioued either by Felton in his PoiHvails, etc., by 
Johnson in his History of Gardtniny, or by Loudon. Donaldson gives 
the title, and the headings of the chapters. I also observe that it is 
alluded to by a late writer in the Lcmdon Quarterly. 

t See Young, Annals of Agriculture, Vol. III. p. 219, (t seq. 



SIR HUGH PLATT. 145 

accorded to Tull. The latter, indeed, proposed the 
drill, and repeated tillage ; but certain advantages, be- 
fore unconsidered, such as increased tillering of individ- 
ual plants, economy of seed, and facility of culture, are 
common to both systems. Sir Hugh, in consecutive 
chapters, shows how the discovery came about ; " v/hy 
the come shootes into so many eares " ; how the 
gi'ound is to be dug for the new practice ; and what 
are the several instruments for making the holes and 
covering the grain. 

He further relates, with a simplicity which is almost 
suspicious, that the art of dibbling .grain originated 
with a silly wench who had been put by her master to 
the setting of carrots and radishes ; and having some 
seed-wheat in her bag, she dropped some kernels into 
the holes prepared for the carrots, and these few ker- 
nels shot up with such a wonderful luxuriance as had 
never been seen before. 

I cannot take a more courteous leave of this worthy 
gentleman than by giving his own envoi to the most 
considerable of his books : — " Thus, gentle Reader, 
having acquainted thee with my long, costly, and labo- 
rious collections, not written at Adventure, or by an 
imaginary conceit in a Scholler's private studie, but 
wrung out of the earth, by the painfull hand of experi- 
ence : and having also given thee a touch of Nature, 
whom no man as yet ever diu'st send naked into the 
10 



146 WET DAYS. 

worlde without her veyle : and Expecting, by thy good 
entertainement of these, some encouragement for higher 
and deeper discoveries hereafter, I leave thee to the 
God of Nature, from whom all the true light of Nature 
proceedeth." 

Gervase Marhham. 

GERVASE MARKHAM must have been a rois- 
tering gallant about the time that Sir Hugh was 
conducting his experiments on " Soyles " ; for, in 1591, 
he had the honor to be dangerously wounded in a duel 
which he fought in behalf of the Countess of Shrews- 
bury ; there are also some painful rumors current (in 
old books) in regard to his habits in early life, which 
weaken somewhat our trust in him as a quiet country- 
counsellor. I suspect, that, up to mature life, at any 
rate, he knew much more about the sparring of a 
game-cock than the making of capons. Yet he wrote 
books upon the proper care of beasts and fowls, as 
well as upon almost evei'y subject connected with hus- 
bandry. And that these were good books, or at least 
in large demand, we have in evidence the memoran- 
dum of a promise which some griping bookseller ex- 
torted from him, under date of July, 1617: — 

"I, Gervase Markham, of London, Gent, do promise 



GERVASE MARKHAM. 147 

hereafter never to write any more book or books to be 
printed of the diseases or cures of any cattle, as horse, 
oxe, cowe, sheepe, swine and goates, &c. In witness 
whereof, I have hereunto sett my hand, the 24"' day of 
Julie. " Gervis Markham." 

I have already alluded to his edition of the " Mai- 
son Rustique " of Liebault ; and notwithstanding the 
religiously meditative air which belongs to some por- 
tions of his " Country Contentments," he had a hand 
in the concoction of one or two poems that kindled 
greatly the ire of the Puritan clergy. 

From a book of his to which he gave the title of 
" The English Husbandman " I venture to copy on the 
next page a little plan of an English farm-house, which 
he assures us is given not to please men of dignity, 
but for the profit of the plain husbandman. 

There is no doubt but he was an adroit book-maker ; 
and the value of his labors, in respect to practical 
husbandry, was due chiefly to his art of arranging, 
compacting, and illustrating the maxims and practices 
already received. His observations uj^on diseases of 
cattle and upon horsemanship were doubtless based on 
experimental knowledge ; for he was a rare and ardent 
sportsman, and possessed all a sportsman's keenness in 
the detection of infirmities. 

In this connection I quote a little passage about the 



148 



WET DAYS. 





1 r 
D 


P 


r 


pr- 


M 


L 

r 


K 


" 


■ 


— 1. 1— ' ^ 


■' G 


|_F 


1 


-1 




C 

, 1 


N N 


1 1 

H 

1 1 






A MODEL ENGLISH FARM-HOUSE, A. D. 1600.* 

manner of " putting a Cocke into battel," which he has 
interpolated upon the grave work of the Councillor 
Heresbach. 

" When your cocke is equally matched, it is then 
your part to give him all the naturall and lawfull advan- 
tages, which may availe for his conquest; as first to 



* Explanation of references: — 

"A. Signifies the great hall. •• H. Inner cellar to serve for larder. 

B. The dining-parlor for stran- I. Buttery. 

gers. K. Kitchen. 

C. Closet for use of mistress. L. Dairy -house. 

D. Strangers' lodging. M. Milk-house. 

E. Staircase to room over parlor. N. A faire sawnie pale. 

F. Staircase to goodman's room. 0. Great gate to ride in to hall-dore. 

G. The skrene in the hall. P. Place for pump." 



GERVASE MARKHAM. 149 

disburden him of all things superfluous, as extravagant 
feathers about his head, the long feathers of his Mane, 
even from the head to the Shoulders, and this must be 
done as close to the necke as may be, for the least 
feather his enemy can catch hould on, is a ladder by 
which he will rise to destroy him ; also the small 
feathers about his rumpe and others of like- nature. 
As thus he takes away things superfluous, so you must 
add to those which have anything wanting, as if his 
Beake be rough, you must smooth it, but not weaken it ; 
if his Spurres be blunt and uneven, you must sharpen 
them and make them so piercing that on the smallest 
entrance, they may run up to the very beame of the 
leg ; and for his wings you must make them like the 
wings of a Dragon, every feather like a ponyard, stab- 
bing and wounding wheresoever they touch : this done 
rub his head over Avith your own Spittel, and so leave 
him to Fortune." 

The advice may seem somewhat out of date, and yet 
I cannot help being reminded by it of the way in which 
our politicians prepare their Presidential candidates. 
The last suggestion of Markham (as cited above) is 
particularly descriptive. 

It would be unfair to the good man's memory to leave 
him pitting a cock ; so I will give the reader some of 
his hints in regard to the appointments of the English 
house^vife. 



150 WET DAYS. 

" Let her garments," he says, (and it might be said in 
New England,) " be comely and strong, made as well to 
preserve health, as to adorn the person, altogether with- 
out toyish garnishes, or the gloss of light colors, and 
as far from the vanity of new and fantastick fashions, 
as near to the comely imitation of modest matrons. Let 
her dyet be wholsome^ and cleanly, prepared at due 
hours, and cooked with care and diligence ; let it be 
rather to satisfie nature, than her affections, and apter 
to kill hunger, than revive new appetites. Let it pro- 
ceed more from the provision of her own yard, than 
the furniture of the markets ; and let it be rather es- 
teemed for the familiar acquaintance she hath with it, 
than for the strangeness and rarity it biingeth from 
other countries. 

" To conclude, our English Housewife must be of 
chaste thoughts, stout courage, patient, untired, watch- 
ful, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendshii?, full 
of good neighborhood, wise in discourse, but not fre- 
quent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter 
or talkative, secret in her affairs, comfortable in her 
counsels, and generally skilfuU in the worthy knowl- 
edges which do belong to her vocation." 

Again he gives us the details of a " humble feast 
of a proportion which any good man may keep in his 
family." 

" As thus : — first, a shield of brawn with nuistard ; 



GERVASE MARKHAM. 151 

secondly, a boyl'd capon ; thirdly, a boyl'd piece of 
beef ; fourthly, a chine of beef rosted ; fifthly, a neat's 
tongue rosted ; sixthly, a pig rosted ; seventhly, chewits 
baked ; eightly, a goose rosted ; ninthly, a swan rosted ; 
tenthly, a turkey rosted ; eleventh, a haunch of venison 
rosted ; twelfth, a pasty of venison ; thirteenth, a kid 
with a pudding in the belly ; fourteenth, an olive pye ; 
the fifteenth, a couple of capons; the sixteenth, a 
custard or dowsets." 

This is what Master Gervase calls a frugal dinner, for 
the entertainment of a worthy friend ; is it any wonder 
that he wrote about " Country Contentments " ? 

My chapter is nearly full ; and a burst of sunshine is 
flaming over all the land under my eye ; and yet I am 
but just entered upon the period of English literary 
history which is most rich in rural illustration. The 
mere backs of the books relating thereto, as my glance . 
ranges over them, where they stand in tidy platoon, 
start a delightfully confused picture to my mind. 

I think it possible that Sir Hugh Piatt may some 
day entertain at his Bednall-Greene gai'den the wor- 
shipful Francis Bacon, who is living dow^l at Twicken- 
ham, and who is a thriving lawyer, and has written es- 
says, which Sir Hugh must know, — in which he dis- 
courses shrewdly upon gardens, as well as many kindred 
matters ; and through his wide correspondence. Sir 



152 WET DAYS. 

Hugh must probably have heard of certain new herbs 
which have been brought home from Virginia and the 
Roanoke, and very possibly he is making trial of a to- 
bacco-plant in his garden, to be submitted some day to 
his friend, the French ambassador. 

I can fancy Gervase Markham " making a night of 
it" with those rollicking bachelors, Beaumont and 
Fletcher, at the " Mermaid," or going with them to the 
Globe Theatre to see two Warwickshire brothers, Ed- 
mund and Will Shakspeare, who are on the boards 
there, — the latter taking the part of Old Knowell, in 
Ben Jonson's play of " Every Man in his Humour." 
His friends say that this Will has parts. 

Then there is the fiery and dashing Sir Philip Sidney, 
who threatened to thrust a dagger into the heart of poor 
Molyneux, his father's steward, for opening private 
letters (which poor Molyneux never did) ; and Sir 
Philip knows all about jsoetry and the ancients ; and 
in virtue of his knowledges, he writes a terribly magnil- 
oquent and tedious " Arcadia," which, when he comes 
to die gallantly iti battle, is admired and read every- 
where : nowadays it rests mostly on the shelf But 
the memory of his generous and noble spirit is far live- 
lier than his book. It was through him, and his friend- 
ship, probably, that the poet Spenser was gifted by the 
Queen with a fine farm of three thousand acres among 
the Bally-Howra hills of Ireland. 



GERVASE MARKUAM. 153 

And it was here that Sir Wiilter Raleigh, that " shei> 
herd of the sea," visited the poet, and foimd him seated 
" amongst the coolly shade 
Of the green alders, by the MuUa's shore." 

Did the gallant privateer possibly talk with the far- 
mer about the introduction of that new esculent, the 
potato ? * Did they talk tobacco ? Did Colin Clout 
have any observations to make upon the rot in sheep, 
or upon the probable " clip " of the year ? 

Nothing of this ; but 

"He pip'd, I sung; and when he sung, I pip'd: 
By chaunge of tunes each making other merry. " 

The lines would make a fair argument of the poet's 
bucolic life. I have a strong faith that his farming was 
of the higgledy-piggledy order ; I do not believe that 
he could have set a plough into the sod, or have made 
a good " cast " of barley. It is certain, that, when 

♦Introduced probably by Sir Walter Raleigh about 1586. But the 
vegetable was a delicacy (or at least a rarity) in James I.'s time; and 
in 1619 a small number were bought for the Queen's use at one shil- 
ling per pound. In 1662 they were recommended by the Royal Society 
for more extended cultivation. 

Scot Burn, Outlines of Modern Farming, p. 4-'3, gives (without au- 
thority) the year 1750 as the date of their final introduction as a field- 
crop. Parkinson, in his Theafrum Biianicum, first published in 1640, 
names among garden-vegetable:^, " Spanish potatoes, Virginia potatoes, 
and Canada potatoes (Jerusalem artichoke)." See also Johnson, -^/sto?-?/ 
of Gardening, p. 10-3. John ^Mortimer, writing as late as 1707, ( Country- 
man's Knlen/Iar,) says of the potato, " The root is very near the nature 
of the Jerusalem artichoke, but not so good or wholesome. These arc 
planted either of roots or seeds, and may probably he propagated in 
great quantities, and prove good food for swine." 



154 WET DAYS. 

the Tyrone rebels burned him out of Kilcolman Caslle, 
he took no treasure with him but his EHzabeth and 
the two babes ; and the only treasures he left were the 
ashes of the dear child whose face shone on him there 
for the last time, — 

" bright with many a curl 
That cUistered round her head." 

I wish I could love his " Shepherd's Calendar " ; but 
I cannot. Abounding art of language, exquisite fan- 
cies, delicacies innumerable there may be ; but there is 
no exhilarating air from the mountains, no crisp breezes, 
no songs that make the welkin ring, no river that 
champs the bit, no sky-piercing falcon. 

And as for the " Faery Queene," if I must confess it, 
I can never read far without a sense of suffocation from 
the affluence of its beauties. It is a marvellously fair 
sea and broad, — with tender winds blowing over it, 
and all the ripples are iris-hued ; but you long for some 
brave blast that shall scoop great hollows in it, and 
shake out the briny beads from its lifted waters, and 
drive wild scuds of spray among the screaming cur- 
lews. 

In short, I can never read far in Spenser without tak- 
ing a rest, — as we farmers lean upon our spades, when 
the cUgging is in unctuous fat soil that lifts heavily. 

And so I leave the matter, — with the " Faery 
Queene " in my thought, and leaning on my spade. 



FIFTH DAY, 



English Weailier, 

\XTE are fairly on English ground now ; of course, 
* * it is wet weather. The phenomena of the Brit- 
ish climate have not changed much since the time when 
the rains " let fall their horrible pleasure " upon the 
head of the poor, drenched outcast, Lear. Thunder 
and lightning, however, which belonged to that partic- 
ular war of the elements, are rare in England. The 
rain is quiet, fine, insinuating, constant as a lover, — not 
wasting its resom'ces in sudden, explosive outbreaks. 

During a foot-tramp of some four hundred miles, 
which I once had the pleasure of making upon English 
soil, and which led me fiom the mouth of the Thames 
to its sources, and thence through Derbyshire, the West 
Riding of Yorkshire, and all of the Lake counties, I do 
not think that the violence of the rain kept me housed 
for more than five days out of forty. Not to say that 
the balance showed sunshine and a bonny sky ; on the 



156 WET DAYS. 

contrary, a soft, lubricating mist is the normal condition 
of tlie British atmosphere ; and a neutral tint of gray 
sky, when no wet is falling, is almost sure to call out 
from the country-landlord, if communicative, an explo- 
sive and authoritative, " Fine morning, this, Sir ! " 

The really fine, sunny days — days you believed in 
rashly, upon the sunny evidence of such blithe poets as 
Herrick — are so rare, that, after a month of British 
travel, you can count them on your fingers. On such a 
one, by a piece of good fortune, I saw all the parterres 
of Hampton Court, — its great vine, its labyrinthine 
walks, its stately alleys, its ruddy range of brick, its 
clipped lindens, its rotund and low-necked beauties of 
Sir Peter Lely, and the red geraniums flaming on the 
window-sills of once royal apartments, where the pen- 
sioned dowagers now dream away their lives. On 
another such day, Twickenham, and all its delights of 
trees, bowers, and villas, were flashing in the sun as 
brightly as ever in the best days of Horace Walpole or 
of Pope. And on yet another, after a weary tramp, I 
toiled up to the inn-door of " The Bear," at Woodstock ; 
and after a cut or two into a ripe haunch of Oxford- 
shire mutton, with certain '' tiny kickshaws," I saw, for 
the first time, under the light of a glorious sunset, that 
exquisite velvety stretch of the park of Woodstock, — 
dimpled with water, dotted with forest-clumps, — where 
companies of sleek fallow-deer were grazing by the 



ENGLISH WEATHER. 157 

hundred, where pheasants whirred away down the aisles 
of wood, where memories of Fair Rosamond and of 
Rochester and of Alice Lee lingered, — and all brought 
to a ringing close by Southey's ballad of '' Blenheim," 
as the shadow of the gaunt Marlborough column 
slanted across the path. 

There are other notable places, however, which seem 
— so dependent are we on first impressions — to be al- 
ways bathed in a rain -cloud. It is quite impossible, 
for instance, for me to think of London Bridge save as 
a great reeking thoroughfare, slimy %vith thin mud, with 
piles of umbrellas crowding over it, like an army of tur- 
tles, and its balustrade streaming with wet. The charm- 
ing little Dulwich Gallery, with its Berghems, Gainsbor- 
oughs, and Murillos, I remember as situated somewhere 
(for I could never find it again of my onn head) at 
a very rainy distance from London, under the spout of 
an interminable waterfall. The guide-books talk of a 
pretty neighborhood, and of a thousand rural charms 
thereabout ; I remember only one or two draggled po- 
licemen in oil-skin capes, and with heads slanted to the 
wind, and my cabby, in a four-caped coat, shaking him- 
self like a water-dog, in the area. Exeter, Gloucester, 
and Glasgow are three great wet cities in my mem- 
ory, — a damp cathedral in each, with a damp-coated 
usher to each, who shows damp tombs, and whose talk 
is dampening to the last degree. I suppose they have 



158 WET DAYS. 

sunshine in these places, and in the light of the sun I 
am sure that marvellous gray tower of Gloucester must 
make a rare show ; hut all the reports in the world will 
not avail to dry up the image of those wet days of 
visit. 

Considering how very much the fair days are over- 
balanced by the dirty, thick, dropping, misty weather 
of England, I think we take a too sunny aspect of her 
history : it has not been under the full-faced smiles of 
heaven that her battles, revolutions, executions, and 
pageants have held their august procession ; the rain 
has wet many a May-day and many a harvesting, whose 
traditional color (through tender English verses) is 
gaudy with yellow sunshine. The revellers of the 
" Midsummer Night's Dream " would find a wet turf 
eight days out of ten to disport vipon. We think of 
Bacon without an umbrella, and of Cromwell without a 
mackintosh ; yet I suspect both of them carried these, 
or their equivalents, pretty constantly. Raleigh, indeed, 
threw his velvet cloak into the mud for the Virgin 
Queen to tread upon, — from which we infer a recent 
shower ; but it is not often that an historical incident is 
so suggestive of the true state of the atmosphere. 

History, however, does not mind the rain : agriculture 
must. Moi-e especially in any view of British agri- 
culture, whether old or new, and in any estimate of its 
theories or progress, due consideration must be had for 



ENGLISH WEATHER. 169 

the generous dampness of the British atmosphere. To 
this cause is to be attributed primarily that wonderful 
velvety turf which is so mimatchable elsewhere ; to the 
same cause, and to the accompanying even temperature, 
is to be credited very much of the success of the 
turnip-culture, which has within a century revolution- 
ized the agriculture of England ; yet again, the mag- 
ical effects of a thorough system of drainage are no- 
where so demonstrable as in a soil constantly wetted, and 
giving a steady flow, however small, to the discharging 
tile. Measured by inches, the rain - fall is greater in 
most parts of America than in Great Britain ; but this 
fall is so capricious with us, often so sudden and violent, 
that there must be inevitably a large surface-discharge, 
even though the tile, three feet below, is in working or- 
der. The true theory of skilful drainage is, not to carry 
away the quick flush of a shower, but to relieve a soil 
too heavily saturated by opening new outflows, setting 
new currents astir of both air and moisture, and thus 
giving new life and an enlarged capacity to lands that 
were dead with a stagnant over-soak. 

Bearing in mind, then, the conditions of the British 
climate, which are so much in keeping with the " wet 
weather " of these studies, let us go back again to old 
Markham's day, and amble along — armed with our 
umbrellas — through tlie current of the seventeenth 
century. 



160 WET DAYS. 

Time of James the First. 

JAMES I., that conceited old pedant, whose " Coun- 
terblast to Tobacco " has worked the poorest of 
results, seems to have had a nice taste for fruits ; and 
Sir Henry Wotton, his ambassador at Venice, writing 
from that city in 1622, says, — "I have sent the choic- 
est melon-seeds of all kinds, which His Majesty doth 
expect, as I had order both from my Lord Holderness 
and from Mr. Secretary Calvert." Sir Henry sent also 
with the seeds very particular directions for the culture 
of the plants, obtained probably from some head-gar- 
dener of a Priuli or a Morosini, whose melons had the 
full beat of Italian sunshine upon the south slopes of 
the Vicentine mountains. The same ambassador sends 
at that date to Lord Holderness " a double-flov>'ering 
yellow rose, of no ordinary nature " ; * and it would be 
counted of no ordinary nature now, if what he avers 
be true, — that " it flowreth every month from May till 
almost Christmas." 

King James took special interest in the establishment 
of his garden at the Theobald Palace in Hertfordshire : 
there were clipped hedges, neat array of linden-avenues, 
fountains, and a Mount of Venus within a labyrinth ; 
twelve miles of wall encircled the park, and the soldiers 
of Cromwell foimd fine foraging-ground in it, when they 

* Reliquice Woiioiiiance, p. 317, el seq. 



TIME OF JAMES THE FIRST. 161 

entered upon the premises a few years later. The 
schoolmaster-king formed also a guild of gardeners in 
the city of London, at whose hands certificates of capa- 
city for garden-work were demanded, and these to be 
given only after proper examination of the applicants. 
Lord Bacon possessed a beautiful garden, if we may 
trust his own hints to that effect, and the added praises 
of Wotton. Cashiobury, Holland House, and Greenwich 
gai'dens were all noted in this time ; and the experi- 
ments and successes of the proprietor of Bednall-Greene 
garden I have already alluded to. But the country- 
gentleman, who lived upon his land and directed the 
cultivation of his property, was but a very savage type 
of the Bedford or Oxfordshire landholders of our day. 
It involved a muddy drag over bad roads, after a heavy 
Flemish mare, to bring either one's self or one's crops 
to market. 

Sir Thomas Overbury, who draws such a tender pic- 
ture of a " Milke-lNIayde," is severe, and, I dare say, 
truthful, upon the country-gentleman. *' His conversa- 
tion," says he, " amongst his tenants is desperate : but 
amongst his equals full of doubt. His travel is seldome 
farther than the next market toAvne, and his inquisition 
is about the price of corne : when he travelleth, he 
will goe ten mile out of the way to a cousins house 
of his to save charges ; and rewards servants by taking 
them by the hand when hee departs. Nothing under a 
11 



162 WET DAYS. 

suh-jjoena can draw him to London: and when he is 
there, he sticks fast upon every object, casts his eyes 
away upon gazing, and becomes the prey of every cut- 
purse. When he comes home, those wonders serve 
him for his holy-day talke. If he goe to court, it is in 
yellow stockings : and if it be in winter, in a slight 
tafety cloake, and pumps and pantofles." 

The portrait of the smaller farmer, who, in this time, 
tilled his own ground, is even more severely sketched 
by Bishop Earle. " A plain country fellow is one that 
manures his groimd well, but lets himself lye fallow and 
untilled. He has reason enough to do his business, and 

not enough to be idle or melancholy His hand 

guides the plough, and the plough his thoughts, and his 
ditch and land-mark is the very mound of his medita- 
tions. He expostulates with his oxen very understand- 
ingly, and speaks gee, and ree, better than English. His 
mind is not much distracted with objects, but if a good 
fat cow come in his way, he stands dimib and astonished, 
and though his haste be never so great, will fix here 
half an hours contemplation. His habitation is some 
poor thatched roof, distinguished from his barn by the 
loop-holes that let out smoak, which the rain had long 
since washed through, but for the double ceiling of 
bacon on the inside, which has hung there from his 
grandsires time, and is yet to make rashers for pos- 
terity. He apprehends Gods blessings only in a good 



TIME OF JAMES THE FIRST. 163 

year, or a fat pasture, and never praises him but on 
good ground." 

Such were the men who were to be reached by the 
agricultural literature of the day ! Yet, notwithstand- 
ing this unpromising audience, scarcely a year passed 
but some talker was found who felt himself competent 
to expound the whole art and mystery of husbandry. 

Adam Speed, Gent., (from which title we may pre- 
sume that he was no Puritan,) published a little book in 
the year 1626, which he wittily called " Adam out of 
Eden." In this he undertakes to show how Adam, un- 
der the embarrassing circimistance of being shut out 
of Paradise, may increase the product of a farm from 
two hundred pounds to two thousand pounds a year by 
the rearing of rabbits on furze and broom ! It is all 
mathematically computed ; there is nothing to disap- 
point in the figures ; but I suspect there might be in 
the rabbits. 

Gentlemen Speed speaks of turnips, clover, and po- 
tatoes ; he advises the boiling of " butchers' blood " for 
poultry, and mixing the " pudding " with bran and other 
condiments, which will " feed the beasts very fat." 

The author of " Adam out of Eden " also indulges 
himself in verse, which is certainly not up to the meas- 
ure of " Paradise Lost." This is its taste : — 

" Each soyl hath no liking of every grain, 
Nor barley uor wheat is for every vein ; 



164 WET DAYS. 

Yet know I no country so barren of soyl 
But some kind of come may be gotten with toyl. 
Though husband at home be to count the cost what, 
Yet thus huswife within is as needful as that : 
What helpeth in store to have never so much, 
Half lost by ill-usage, ill huswifes, and such? " 

The papers of Bacon upon subjects connected with 
rural life are so familiar that I need not recur to them. 
His particular suggestions, however sound in themselves, 
(and they generally are sound,) did by no means meas- 
ure the extent of his contribution to the growth of 
good husbandry. But the more thorough methods of 
investigation which he instituted and encouraged gave 
a new and healthier direction to inquiries connected 
not only with agriculture, but with every experimental 
art. 

Thus, Gabriel Platte, publishing his " Observations 
and Improvements in Husbandry," about the year 1 638, 
thinks it necessary to sustain and illustrate them with 
a record of " twenty experiments." 

Sir Richard Weston, too, a sensible up - country 
knight, has travelled through Flanders about the same 
time, and has seen such success attending upon the 
turnip and the clover culture there, that he urges the 
same upon his fellow-landholders, in a " Discourse of 
Husbandrie." 



SAMUEL HARTLIB. 165 

Samuel Hartlib. 

nnHE book last named was published under the au- 
-*- spices of Hartlib, — the same Master Samuel Hartlib 
to whom Milton addressed his tractate " Of Education," 
and of whom the great poet speaks as " a person sent 
hither [to England] by some good Providence from a 
far country, to be the occasion and incitement of great 
good to this island." 

This mention makes xis curious to know something 
more of Master Samuel Hartlib. I find that he was 
the son of a Polish merchant, of Lithuania, was him- 
self engaged for a time in commercial transactions, and 
came to England about the year 1640. He wrote sev- 
eral theological tracts, edited sundry agricultural works, 
including, among others, those of Sir Richard Weston, 
and published his own observations upon the shortcom- 
ings of British husbandry. He also proposed a grandiose 
scheme for an agricultural college, in order to teach 
youths " the theorick and practick parts of this most 
ancient, noble, and honestly gainfull art, trade, or mys- 
tery." Another work published by him, entitled " The 
Legacy," besides notices of the Brabant husbandry, em- 
braces epistles from various farmers, who may be sup- 
posed to represent the progressive agriculture of Eng- 
land. Among these letters I note one upon " Snag- 
greet," (shelly earth from river-beds) ; another upon 



166 WET DAYS. 

" Seaweeds " ; a third upon " Sea-sand " ; and a fourth 
upon " Woollen-rags." 

I also excerpt from the same book a diagram of a 
farm-outlay which some ingenious correspondent con- 
tributed, and which — however well it may -appear on 
paper — I would by no means advise an amateur far- 
mer to adopt. I give it only as a curious relic of the 
agricultural whims of that day. It is signed Coressey 
Dymock. The contributor observes that it may form 
the plot of an entire " Lordship," or may serve for a 
farm of two or three hundred acres. 

Hartlib was in good odor during the days of the 
Commonwealth ; for he lived long enough to see that 
bitter tragedy of the executed king before Whitehall 
Palace, and to hold over to the early years of the Res- 
toration. But he was not in favor with the people 
about Charles II. ; the small pension that Cromwell 
had bestowed fell into sad arrearages ; and the story is, 
that he died miserably poor. 

It is noticeable that Hartlib, and a great many sensi- 
ble old gentlemen of his date, spoke of the art of hus- 
bandry as a mystery. And so it is ; a mystery then, 
and a mystery now. Nothing tries my patience more 
than to meet one of those billet-headed farmers who — 
whether in print or in talk — pretend to have solved 
the mystery and mastered it. 

Take my own crop of corn yonder upon the flat, 



SAMUEL HARTLIB. 



167 




DIAGRAM OF FARM-OUTLAY.* 



* Explanation of references: 

A. Dwelling-house iu centre. 

B. Kitchen-garden. 

C. Orchard. 

D. Choice garden. 

E. Physicall garden. 

F. F. Dairy and laundrj'. 

G. Sheejj-cotes. 

H, H. Closes for swine. 
K, K. Great corn-bams. 
L. Stables and swine-istyes. 



M, M. Little houses for poultry. 

N. Standing racks. 

Q, Q. Closes for single animals. 

E, R. Closes for mares and foal. 

S. S. Pastures for sheep. 

T, T. Closes for work -purposes. 

V. Pasture for fat beeves. 

W. Close for diseased beasts. 

X. Close lor saddle-horse. 

Y. Close for weaning calves. 



168 WET DAYS. 

which I have watched since the day when it first shot 
up its little dainty spears of green, until now its spin- 
dles are waving like banners : the land has been faith- 
fully ploughed and fed and tilled ; but how gross appli- 
ances all these, to the fine fibrous feeders that have 
been searching, day by day, every cranny of the soil, — 
to the broad leaflets that, week by week, have stolen out 
from their green sheaths to wanton with the wind and 
caress the dews ! Is there any quick-witted farmer who 
shall tell us with anything like definiteness what the 
phosphates have contributed to all this, and how much 
the nitrogenous manures, and to what degree the de- 
posits of humus ? He may establish the conditions of 
a sure crop, thirty, forty, or sixty bushels to the acre, 
(seasons favoring) ; but how short a reach is this 
toward determining the final capacity of either soil or 
plant ! How often the most petted experiments laugh 
us in the face ! The great miracle of the vital labora- 
tory in the plant remains to mock us. We test it ; we 
humor it ; we fondly believe that we have detected its 
secret : but the mystery stays. 

A bumpkin may rear a crop that shall keep him 
from starvation ; but to develop the utmost capacity of 
a given soil by fertilizing appliances, or by those of 
tillage, is the work, I suspect, of a wiser man than be- 
longs to our day. And when I find one who fancies 
he has resolved all the conditions which contribute to 



COMMONWEALTH AND RESTORATION. 109 

this miracle of God's, and can control and fructify 
at his will, I have less respect for his head than for a 
good one — of Savoy cabbage. The great problem of 
Adam's curse is not worked out so easily. The sweat- 
ing is not over yet. 

If, however, we are confronted with mystery, it is not 
blank, hopeless, fathomless mystery. It is a lively 
mystery, that piques and tempts and rewards endeavor. 
It unfolds with an appetizing delay. If our plummet- 
lines do not reach the bottom, it is only because they 
are too short ; but they are growing longer. Every 
year a new secret is laid bare, which, in the flush of 
triumph, seems a crowning development; whereas it 
presently appears that we have only opened a new door 
upon some further labyrinth. 

Period of the Commonwealth and Restoration. 

mHROUGHOUT the seventeenth century, the prog- 
-*- ress in husbandry, without being at any one 
period very brilliant, was decided and constant. If 
there was anything like a relapse, and neglect of 
good culture, it was most marked shortly after the 
Restoration. The country-gentlemen, who had enter- 
tained a wholesome horror of Cromwell and his troop- 
ers, had, during the Commoiiwealth, devoted them- 
selves to a quiet life upon their estates, repairing the 



170 WET DAYS. 

damages which the Ci\al War had wrought in their 
fortunes and in their lands. The high price of farm- 
products stimulated their efforts, and their country- 
isolation permitted a hannless show 6f the chivalrous 
contempt they entertained for the new men of the 
Commonwealth. With the return of Charles they 
abandoned their estates once more to the bailiifs, and 
made a rush for the town and for their share of the 
"■ leeks and onions." 

But the earnest men had been constantly at Vv'ork. 
Sainfoin and turnips were growing every year into 
credit. The potato was becoming a crop of value ; 
and in the year 1664 John Foster devoted a treatise 
to it, entitled, " England's Hapj^iness increased, or a 
Sure Remedy against all Succeeding Dear Years, by a 
Plantation of Roots called Potatoes." 

For a long time the crop had been known, and Sir 
Thomas Overbury had made it the vehicle of one of 
his sharp witticisms against people who were forever 
boasting of their ancestry, — their best part being be- 
low ground. But Foster anticipates the full_ value of 
what had before been counted a novelty and a curios- 
ity. He advises how custards, paste, puddings, and even 
bread, may be made from the flour of potatoes. 

John Worlidge in 1669 gave to the public a " System 
of Husbandry " very full in its suggestions, — advising 
green fallows, and even recommending and describing 



COMMONWEALTH AND RESTORATION. 171 

a drill for the putting in of seed, and for distributing 
with it a fine fertilizer. 

Evelyn, also, about this time, gave a dignity to rural 
pursuits by his " Sylva " and " Terra," both these trea- 
tises having been recited before the Royal Society. 
The " Terra " is something muddy,* and is by no 
means exhaustive ; but the " Sylva " for more than a 
century was the British planter's hand-book, being a 
judicious, sensible, and eloquent treatise upon a sub- 
ject as wide and as beautiful as its title. Even "Walter 
Scott, — himself a capital woodsman, — when he tells 
(in " Kenilworth ") of the approach of Tressilian and 
his Doctor companion to the neighborhood of Say's 
Court, cannot forego his tribute to the worthy and 
cultivated author who once lived there, and who in his 
" Sylva " gave a manual to every British planter, and 
in his life an exemplar to every British gentleman. 

Evelyn was educated at Oxford, travelled widely 
upon the Continent, was a firm adherent of the royal 
party, and at one time a member of Prince Rupert's 
famous troop. He married the daughter of the British 
ambassador in Paris, through whom he came into pos- 
session of Say's Court, which he made a gem of 
beauty. But in his later years he had the annoyance 
of seeing his fine parterres and shrubbery trampled 

* Of clay he says, " It is a cursed step-dame to almost all vegeta- 
tion, as having few or no meatuses for the percolation of alimental 
showers." 



172 WET DAYS. 

down by that Northern boor, Peter the Great, who 
made his residence there while studying the mysteries 
of ship-building at Deptford, and who had as little rev- 
erence for a parterre of flowers as for any other of the 
tenderer graces of life. 

The British monarchs have always been more re- 
gardful of those interests which were the object of 
Evelyn's tender devotion. I have already alluded to 
the horticultural fancies of James I. His son Charles 
was an extreme lover of flowers, as well as of a great 
many luxuries which hedged him against all Puritan 
sympathy. " Who knows not," says Milton, in his re- 
ply to the EIKON BA2IAIKH, " the licentious remiss- 
ness of his Sunday's theatre, accompanied with that 
reverend statute for dominical jigs and May-poles, pub- 
lished in his own name," etc. ? 

But the poor king was fated to have little enjoyment 
of either jigs or May-poles ; harsher work belonged to 
his reign ; and all his garden-delights came to be lim- 
ited finally to a little pot of flowers upon his prison- 
window. And I can easily believe that the elegant, 
wrong-headed, courteous gentleman tended these poor 
flowers daintily to the very last, and snufted their fra- 
grance with a Christian gratitude. 

Charles was an appreciative lover of poetry, too, as 
well as of Nature. I wonder if it ever happened to 
him, in his prison-hours at Carisbrooke, to come upon 



COMMONWEALTH AND RESTORATION. 173 

Milton's " L' Allegro," (first printed in the very year 
of the Battle of Naseby,) and to read, — 

" In tiiy right hand lead with thee 
The mounta'iu nymph, sweet Liberty ; 
And if I give thee honor due, 
Mirth, admit me of thy crew 
To live with her, and live with thee, 
In unreprov^d pleasures free ; 
To hear the lark begin his flight. 
And, singing, startle the dull night. 
From his watch-tower in the skies. 
Till the dappled dawn doth rise ; 
Then to come, in spite of sorrow, 
And at my window bid good-morrow, 
Through the sweetbrier, or the vine, 
Or the twisted eglantine." 

How it must have smitten the King's heart to re 
member that the tender poet, whose melody none could 
appreciate better than he, was also the sturdy Puritan 
pamphleteer whose blows had thwacked so terribly 
upon the last props that held up his tottering throne ! 

Cromwell, as we have seen, gave INIaster Hartlib a 
pension ; but whether on the score of his theological 
tracts, or his design for an agricultural college, would 
be hard to say. I suspect that the hop was the Pro- 
tector's favorite among flowering plants, and that his 
admiration of trees was measured by their capacity for 
tunber. Yet that rare masculine energy, which he 
and his men carried with them in their tread all over 



174 WET DAYS. 

England, was a very wakeful stimulus to productive 
agriculture. 

Charles II. loved tulips, and befriended Evelyn. In 
his long residence at Paris he had grown into a great 
fondness for the French gardens. He afterAvard sent 
for Le Notre — who had laid out Versailles at an ex- 
panse of twenty millions of dollars — to superintend 
tlie planting of Greenwich and St. James. Fortu- 
nately, no strict imitation of Versailles was entered 
upon. The splendors of Chatsworth garden grew in 
this time out of the exaggerated taste, and must have 
delighted tlie French heart of Charles. Other artists 
have had the handling of this great domain since the 
days of Le Notre. A crazy wilderness of rock-work, 
amid, which the artificial waters commit freak upon 
freak, has been strewed athwart the lawn ; a stately con- 
servatory has risen, under which the Duke may drive, if 
he choose, in coach and four, amid palm-trees, and the 
monster vegetation of the Eastern archipelago ; the 
little glass temple is in the gardens, under which the 
Victoria lily was first coaxed into British bloom ; a 
model village has sprung up at the Park gates, in 
which each cottage is a gem, and seems transplanted 
from the last book on rural ornamentation. Birt the 
sight of the village oppresses one with a strange incon- 
gruity ; the charm of realism is wanting ; it needs a 
population out of one of Watteau's pictures, — clean 



COMMONWEALTH AND RESTORATION. 175 

and deft as the painted figures ; flesli and blood are 
too gross, too prone to muddy shoes, and to — sneeze. 
The rock-work, also, is incongruous ; it belongs on no 
such wavy roll of park-land ; you see it a thousand 
times grander, a half-hour's drive away, toward Mat- 
lock. And the stiff i3arterres, terraces, and alleys of 
Le Notre are equally out of place in such a scene. If, 
indeed, as at Versailles, they bounded and engrossed 
tlie view, so that natural surfaces should have no claim 
upon your eye, — if they were the mere setting to a 
monster palace, whose colonnades and balusters of 
marble edged away into colonnades and balusters of 
box-wood, and these into a limitless extent of long 
green lines, which are only lost to the eye where a dis- 
tant fountain dashes its spray of golden dust into the 
air, — as at Versailles, — there would be keeping. But 
the Devonshire palace has quite other setting. Blue 
Derbyshire hills are behind it ; a grand, billowy slope 
of the comeliest park-land in England rolls dowTi from 
its terrace-foot to where the Derwent, under hoary oaks, 
washes its thousand acres of meadow-vale, with a flow 
as charming and limpid as one of Virgil's eclogues. It 
is such a setting that carries the great quadrangle of 
Cha'tsworth Palace and its flanking artificialities of 
rock and garden, like a black patch upon the face of a 
fine woman of Charles's court. 

This brings us upon our line of march again. 



176 WET DAYS. 

Charles II. loved stiff gardens ; James 11. loved stiff 
gardens ; and William, with his Low-Country tastes, 
outstiffened both, with his 

" topiary box a-row."' 

Lord Bacon has commended the formal style to 
public admiration by his advocacy and example. The 
lesson was repeated at Cashiobury by the most noble 
the Earl of Essex (of whom Evelyn writes, — " My 
Lord is not illiterate beyond the rate of most noblemen 
of his age "). So also that famous garden of Moor- 
Park in Hertfordshire,* laid out by the witty Duchess 
of Bedford, to whom Dr. Donne addresses some of his 
piquant letters, was a model of old - fashioned and 
stately graces. Sir William Temple praises it beyond 
reason in his " Garden of Epicurus," and cautions 
readers against imdertaking any of those irregularities 
of garden - figures which the Chinese so much affect. 
He admires only stateliness and primness. "Among 
us," he says, " the Beauty of Building and Planting is 
placed chiefly in some certain Proportions, Symmetries, 
or Uniformities ; our Walks and our Trees ranged so as 
to answer one another, and at exact Distances." 

From all these it is clear what was the garden-drifl 
of the century. Even Waller, the poet, — who could 
be more affluent with his moneys than most poets, — 

* Not to be confounded with Temple's own home — of the same 
name — in Surrey, where his heart was buried under an m"n. 



OLD ENGLISH HOMES. 177 

spent a large siini in levelling the hills about his rural 
home at Beaconsfields. (We shall find a different jioet 
and treatment by-and-by in Shenstone.) 

Only Milton, speaking from the very arcana of the 
Puritan rigidities, breaks in upon these geometric for- 
malities with the rounded graces of the garden which 
he planted in Eden. There 

" the crisped brooks, 
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold 
With mazy error under pendent shades, 
Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed 
Flowers worthy of Pai'adise, which not nice Art 
In beds and curious knots, but Nature boon 
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain." 

Going far behind all conventionalities, he credited 
to Paradise — the ideal of man's happiest estate - — 
variety, irregularity, profusion, luxuriance ; and to the 
fallen estate, precision, formality, and an inexorable 
Art, which, in place of concealing, glorified itself. In 
the next century, when Milton comes to be illustrated 
by Addison and the rest, we shall find gardens of a 
different style from those of Waller and of Hampton 
Court. 

Old English Somes. 

AND now from some lookout - point near to the 
close of the seventeenth century, when John 
Evelyn, in his age, is repairing the damages that Peter 

12 



178 WET DAYS. 

the Great has wrought in his pretty Deptford home, 
let us take a bird's-eye glance at rural England. 

It is I'aining ; and the clumsy Bedford coach, drawn 
by stout Flemish mares, — for thorough-breds are as 
yet unknown, — is covered with a sail-cloth to keep the 
wet away from the six " insides." The grass, wherever 
the land is stocked with grass, is as velvety as now. 
The wheat in the near county of Herts is fair, and will 
turn twenty bushels to the acre ; here and there an 
enterprising landholder has a small field of dibbled 
grain, which will yield a third more. John Worlidge's 
drill is not in request, and is only talked of by a few 
wiseacres who prophesy its ultimate adoption. The fat 
bullocks of Bedford will not dress more than nine 
hundred a head ; and the cows, if killed, would not 
overrun five hundred weight. Horses " run at grass " 
for eighteenpence per week ; oxen and cows at sixpence 
to a shilling, according to size.* There are occasional 
fields of sainfoin and of turnips ; but these latter are 
small, and no ridging or hurdling is yet practised. 
From time to time appears a patch of barren moor- 
land, which has been planted with forest-trees, in ac- 
cordance with the suggestions of Mr. Evelyn, and under 
the wet sky the trees are thriving. Wide reaches of 
fen, measiu'ed by hundreds of miles, (which now bear 

* The Country Gentleman's Vade - Mceum, by Giles Jacob, Gent., 
1717. 



OLD ENGLISH HOMES. 179 

great crops of barley,) are saturated with moisture, and 
tenanted only by ghost-like companies of cranes. 

The gardens attached to noble houses, under the care 
of some pupil of John Rose or of Quintinie, have their 
espaliers, — their plimis, their pears,* and their grapes. 
These last are rare, however, (Parkinson says sour, 
too,) and bear a great price in the London market. 
One or two horticulturists of extraordinary enterprise 
have built greenhouses, warmed, Evelyn says, " in a 
most ingenious way, by passing a brick flue underneath 
the beds." 

But these were quite exceptional among the country- 
gentry, — fully as much so as the ruralist of our time 
who has his orchard-house, and who entertains his 
friends in May or June with a dwarf nectarine upon the 
table, in full bearing. I suspect that if we had wan- 
dered, in the days of which I speak, into the house of 
a Dorsetshire squire, we should have found in the great 
hall terriers, spaniels, and hounds lying about promis- 
cuously, with, very likely, a litter of cats in a big arm- 
chair ; there would have been an oaken table covered 
Vv'ith cards and dice-boxes; in a cupboard of the wain- 
scot I am sure we should have found a venison-pasty, 
and a black case-bottle of " something warming." Very 

* Sir William Temple gives this list of his pears: — Blanqiiet, Eobin, 
Rousselet, Pepin, Jargonel;and for autumn: Buree, Vertlongue, and 
Bergamot. 



180 WET DAYS. 

likely upon some double-decked table which has the 
air of an altar there would be a Bible and the " Book 
of Martyrs " ; but for all the flax-haired squire had to 
do with them, they would be dusty ; and ten to one a 
hawk's-hood or a fox-skin might be lying on them. 
Tobacco-pipes would not be out of sight, and a stale 
scent of them would mingle with the smell of terriers 
and half-dried otter-sldns. Worlidge and Evelyn would 
be as much sneered at (if ever heard of) by such a 
squire as the progressive agriculturists are by our old- 
fashioned men now ; and like these last the old squire 
would hold tenaciously upon life, — mounting a horse 
at fourscore, and knowing nothing of spectacles.* I 
can fancy such an old gentleman saying to his after- 
dinner guest, with Shallow, (who lived so long before 
him,) " Nay, you shall see mine orchard : where in an 
arbor, we will eat a last year's pippin of my own graff- 
ing, with a dish of carraways, and so forth." 

Yet this flax-haired, rotund squire, so loud-mouthed 
and tyrannic in his own household, would hardly ven- 
ture up to London, for fear of the footpads on the 
heath and the insolence of the blackguard Cockneys. 
His wife should be some staid dame, lean, but rosy of 
visage, learned at the brew-tub and in the buttery, who 
could bandy words on occasions with the squire, yet 
not speaking French, nor wearing hoops or patches. 

* See Gilpin's Forest Scenery, Vol. II. pp. 23-26. 



OLD ENGLISH HOMES. 181 

A daughter, it may be, illumines the place, (Avho 
knows ?) — 

" ycleped Dawsabel 

A maiden fair and free : 
And for she was her fathers heir, 
Full well she was ycond the leir 

Of mickle courtesy. 

" Her features all as fresh above, 
As is the grass that grows by Dove, 

And Ij'the as lass of Kent. 
Her skin as soft as Leinster wool, 
As white as snow on peakish Hull, 
Or swan that swims in Trent." 

Draytojt. 

A great many of the older exotic j^lants would, I 
suppose, be domesticated at the door, and possibly wife 
or daughter would have plead successfully with the 
squire for the presence of a few rare bulbs from Hol- 
land ; but whether these or not, we may be sure that 
there was a flaming parterre of peonies, of fleurs-de- 
lis, and of roses ; yet all of these not half so much 
valued by the good-wife as her bed of marjoram and 
of thyme. She may read King James's Bible, or, if a 
Non - Conformist, Baxter's " Saint's Rest " ; while the 
husband (if he ever reads at all) regales himself with a 
thimib-worn copy of " Sir Fopling Flutter," or, if he 
live well into the closing years of the century, with De 
Foe's " True-born Englishman." 



182 WET DAYS. 

A Brace of Pastorals. 

~|30ETIC feeling was more lacking in tlie country-life 
-'*- than in the illustrative literature of the period. 
To say nothing of Milton's brilliant little poems 
" L' Allegro " and " H Penseroso," which flash all over 
with the dews, there are the charming " Characters " of 
Sir Thomas Overbury, and the graceful discourse of 
Sir William Temple. The poet Drummond wrought a 
music out of the woods and waters which lingers allur- 
ingly even now around the delightful cliffs and valleys 
of HaAvthornden. John Dryden, though a thorough 
cit, and a man who would have preferred his arm-chair 
at Will's Coffee- House to Chatsworth and the fee of all 
its lands, has yet touched most tenderly the " daisies 
white " and the spring, in his adaptation of " The Flower 
and the Leaf" 

But we skip a score of the poets, and bring our wet 
day to a close with the naming of two honored pasto- 
rals. The first, in sober prose, is nothing more nor less 
than Walton's " Angler." Its homeliness, its calm, 
sweet pictures of fields and brooks, its dainty per- 
fume of flowers, its delicate shadowing-forth of the 
Christian sentiment which lived by old English fire- 
sides, its simple, artless songs, (not always of the 
highest style, but of a hearty naturalness that is infi- 
nitely better,) — these make the " Angler " a book that 



BRACE OF PASTORALS. 183 

stands among the thumb-worn. There is good mar- 
rowy English in it ; I know very fev/ fine writers of 
our times who could make a better book on such a sub- 
ject to-day, — with all the added information, and all 
the practice of the newspaper-columns. What Walton 
wants to say he says. You can make no mistake about 
his meaning ; all is as lucid as the water of a spring. 
He does not play upon your wonderment v/ith tropes. 
There is no chicane of the pen ; he has some pleasant 
matters to tell of, and he tells of them — straight. 

Another great charm about Walton is his childlike 
truthfulness. I think he is almost the only earnest 
trout -fisher I ever knew (unless Sir Humphry Davy 
be excepted) whose report could be relied upon for the 
weight of a trout. I have many excellent friends — 
capital fishermen — whose word is good upon most 
concerns of life, but in this one thing they cannot be 
confided in. I excuse it ; I take off twenty per cent, 
from their estunates without either hesitation, anger, or 
reluctance. 

I do not think I should have trusted in such a mat- 
ter Chax'les Cotton, although he Vv^as agricultural as 
well as piscatory, — having published a " Planter's 
Manual." I think he could, and did, draw a long bow. 
I suspect innocent milkmaids were not in the habit of 
singing Kit Marlowe's songs to the worshipful Mr. 
Cotton. 



184 WET DAYS. 

One pastoral remains to mention, published at the 
very opening of the year 1600, and spending its fine 
forest-aroma thenceforward all doAvn the century. I 
mean Shakspeare's play of " As You Like It." 

From beginning to end the grand old forest of 
Arden is astir overhead ; from beginning to end the 
brooks brawl in your ear; from beginning to end 
you smell the bruised ferns and the delicate-scented 
wood-flowers. It is Theocritus again, with the civiliza- 
tion of the added centuries conti'ibuting its spangles of 
reason, philosophy, and grace. Who among all the 
short-kirtled damsels of all the eclogues will match us 
this fair, lithe, witty, capricious, mirthful, buxom Rosa- 
lind ? Nowhere in books have we met with her like, — 
but only at some long-gone picnic in the woods, where 
we Avorshipped "• blushing sixteen " in dainty boots and 
white muslin. There, too, we met a match for sighing 
Orlando, — mirrored in the water; there, too, some 
diluted Jaques may have " moralized " the excursion for 
next day's " Courier," and some lout of a Touchstone 
(there are always such in picnics) passed the ices, 
made poor puns, and won more than his share of the 
smiles. 

Walton is English all over ; but " As You Like It " 
is as broad as the sky, or love, or folly, or hope. 



SIXTH DAY. 



A British Tavern. 

TT is a pelting November rain. No leaves are left 
-*- upon the branches save a few yellow flutterers on 
the tips of the willows and poplars, and the bleached 
company that will be clinging to the beeches and the 
white-oaks for a month to come. All others are 
whipped away by the night-winds into the angles of 
old walls, or are packed under low-limbed shrubberies, 
there to swelter and keep warm the rootlets of the 
newly planted weigelias and spruces, until the snows 
and February suns and April mists and May heats 
shall have transmuted them into fat and xmctuous 
mould. A close, pelting, unceasing rain, trying all the 
leaks of the mossy roof, testing all the newly laid 
drains, pressing the fountain at my door to an exuber- 
ant gush, — a rain that makes outside work an impos- 
sibility ; and as I sit turning over the leaves of an old 
book of engravings, wondering what drift my rainy- 



186 WET DAYS. 

day's task shall take, I come upon a pleasant view of 
Dovedale in Derbyshire, a little exaggerated, perhaps, 
in the luxuriance of its trees and the depth of its 
shadov/s, but recalling vividly the cloudy April morn- 
ing on which, fifteen years agone, I left the inn of the 
*' Green Man and Black's Head," in the pretty town of 
Ashbourne, and strolled away by the same road on 
which Mr. Charles Cotton ojDens his discourse of fish- 
ing with Master " Viator," and plunged down the steep 
valley-side near to Thorpe, and wandered for three 
miles and more, imder towering crags, and on soft, 
sjDongy bits of meadow, beside the blithe river where 
Walton had cast, in other days, a gray palmer-fly, — 
past the hospitable hall of the worshipful Mr. Cotton, 
and the wreck of the old fishing-house, over whose 
lintel was graven in the stone the interlaced initials of 
" Piscator, Junior," and his great master of the rod. As 
the rain began to patter on the sedges and the pools, I 
climbed out of the valley, on the northward or Derby- 
shire side, and striding away through the heather, 
which belongs to the rolling heights of this region, I 
presently found myself upon the great London and 
Manchester highway. A broad and stately thorough- 
fare it had been in the old days of coaching ; but now a 
close, fine turf invested it all, save one narrow strip of 
Macadam in the middle. The mile-stones, which had 
been showy, pahited affairs of iron, were now deeply 



A BRITISH TAVERN. 187 

bitten and blotched with rust. Two of them I had 
passed, without sight of house or of other traveller, 
save one belated drover, who was huiTying to the fair 
at Ashbourne ; as I neared the third, a great hulk of 
building appeared upon my left, with a crowd of aspir- 
ing chimneys, from which only one timid little pennant 
of smoke coiled into the harsh sky. 

The gray, inhospitable-looking pile proved to be one 
of the old coach-inns, which, with its score of vacant 
chambers and huge stable-court, was left stranded upon 
the deserted higliAvay of travel. It stood a little space 
back from the road, so that a coach and four, or, in- 
deed, a half-dozen together, might have come up to 
the door-way in dashing style. But it must have been 
many years since such a demand had been made upon 
the resources of bustling landlord and of attendant 
grooms and waiters. The doors were tightly closed ; 
even the sign-board creaked uneasily in the Avind, and 
a rampant growth of ivy that clambered over the porch 
so covered it with leaves and berries that I could not 
at all make out its burden. I gave a sharp ring to the 
bell, and heard the echo repeated from the deserted 
stable-court ; there was the yelp of a hound somewhere 
v\'ithin, and presently a slatternly-dressed woman re- 
ceived me, and, conducting me down a bare hall, 
showed me into a great dingy parlor, where a nuu-ky 
fire was struggling in the grate. A score of roistering 



188 WET DAYS. 

travellers might have made the stately parlor gay ; and 
I dare say they did, in years gone ; but now I had only 
for company — their heavy old arm-chairs, a few prints 
of " fast coaches " upon the wall, and a superannuated 
greyhound, who seemed to scent the little meal I had 
ordered, and presently stalked in and laid his thin nose, 
with an appealing look, in my hands. His days of 
coursing — if he ever had them — were fairly over; 
and I took a charitable pride in bestowing upon him 
certain tough morsels of the rump-steak, garnished with 
horse-radish, with which I was favored for dinner. 

I had intended to push on to Buxton the same after- 
noon ; but the deliberate sprinkling of the morning 
had quickened by two o'clock into a swift, pelting 
rain, the very counterpart of that which is beating on 
my windows to-day. There was nothing to be done 
but to make my home of the old coach-inn for the 
night ; and for my amusement — besides the slumber- 
ous hound, who, after dinner, had taken up position 
upon the faded rug lying before the grate — there was 
a " Bell's Messenger " of the month past, and, as good 
luck would have it, a much-bethumbed copy of a work 
on horticulture and kindred subjects, first printed some- 
where about the beginning of the eighteenth centuiy, 
and entitled " The Clergyman's Recreation, showing 
the Pleasure and Profit of the Art of Gardening," by 
the Reverend John Laiu'ence. 



EARLY ENGLISH GARDENERS. 189 

It was a queer book to be found in this pretentious 
old coach-inn, with its silken bell-pulls and stately par- 
lors ; and I thought how the roisterers who came thun- 
dering over the road years ago, and chucked the bar- 
maids under the chin, must have turned up their noses, 
ailer their pint of crusted Port, at the " Clergyman's 
Recreation." Yet, for all that, the book had a rare in- 
terest for me, detailing, as it did, the methods of fruit- 
culture in England a hundred and forty years ago, and 
showing with nice particularity how the espaliers could 
be best trained, and how a strong infusion of walnut- 
leaf tea will destroy all noxious worms. 

And now, when, upon this other wet day, and in the 
quietude of my own library, I come to measure the 
claims of this ancient horticulturist to consideration, I 
find that he was the author of some six or seven dis- 
tinct works on kindred subjects, showing good knowl- 
edge of the best current practice ; and although he in- 
curred the sneers of Mr. Tull, who hoped " he preached 
better than he ploughed," there is abundant evidence 
that his books were held in esteem. 



.Earltf English Gardeners. 

i^ONTE:MPORARY with the Rev. Mr. Laurence 
^-^ were London and Wise, the famous horticulturists 
of Brompton, (whose nursery, says Evelyn, " was the 



190 - WET DAYS. 

greatest work of the kind ever seen or heard of, either 
in books or travels,") also Switzer, a pupil of the latter, 
and Professor Richard Bradley. 

Mr. London was the director of the royal gardens 
under William and Mary, and at one time had in his 
charge some three or four hundred of the most consid- 
erable landed estates in England. He was in the habit 
of riding some fifty miles a day to confer with his sub- 
ordinate gardeners, and at least two or three times in 
a season traversed the whole length and breadth of 
England, — and this at a period, it must be remem- 
bered, when travelling was no holiday-affair, as is evi- 
dent from the mishaps which befell those well-known 
contemporaneous travellers of Fielding, — Joseph An- 
drews and Parson Adams. Traces of the work of 
Mr. London are to be seen even now in the older parts 
of the grounds of Blenheim and of Castle Howard in 
Yorkshire. 

Stephen Switzer was an accomplished gardener, well 
known by a great many horticultural and agricultural 
works, which in his day were " on sale at his seed-shop 
in Westminster Hall." Chiefest among these was the 
" Ichnographia Rustica," which gave general direc- 
tions for the management of country-estates, while it 
indulged in some prefatory magniloquence upon the 
dignity and antiquity of the art of gardening. It is 
the first of all arts, he claims ; for '' tho' Chirurgery 



EARLY ENGLISH GARDENERS. 191 

may plead high, inasmuch as in the second chapter of 
Genesis that operation is recorded of taking the rib 
from Adam, wherewith woman was made, yet the very 
current of the Scriptures determines in favor of Gar- 
dening." It surprises us to find 'that so radical an in- 
vestigator should entertain the belief, as he clearly did, 
that certain plants were produced without seed by the 
vegetative power of the sun acting upon the earth. 
He is particularly severe upon those Scotch gardeners, 
" Northern lads," who, with " a little learning and a 
great deal of impudence, know, or pretend to know, 
more in one twelvemonth than a laborious, honest 
South-country man does in seven years." 

His agricultural observations are of no special value, 
nor do they indicate any advance from the practice of 
Worlidge. He deprecates paring and burning as ex- 
haustive of the vegetable juices, advises winter fallow- 
ing and marling, and affirms that " there is no supei*- 
ficies of earth, how poor soever it may be, but has in 
its own bowels something or other for its own improve- 
ment." 

In gardening, he expresses great contempt for the 
clipped trees and other excesses of the Dutch school, 
yet advises the construction of terraces, lays out his 
ponds by geometric formulae, and is so far devoted to 
out-of-door sculpture as to urge the establishment of a 
royal institution for the instruction of ingenious young 



192 WET DAYS. 

men, who, on being taken into the service of noblemen 
and gentlemen, would straightway people their grounds 
with statues. And this notwithstanding Addison had 
published his famous papers on the " Pleasvu'es of the 
Imagination " tliree yeurs before.* 

Richard Bradley was tlie Dr. Lardner of his day, — a 
man of general scientific acquirement, an indefatigable 
worker, venturing hazardous predictions, writing some 
fifteen or twenty volumes upon subjects connected with 
agriculture, foisting himself into the chair of Botany 
at Cambridge by noisy reclamation, selling his name to 
tlie booksellers for attachment to other men's wares,t 
and, finally, only escaping the indignity of a removal 
from his professor's chair by sudden death, in 1732. 
Yet this gentleman's botanical dictionary (" Historia 
Plantarum," etc.) was quoted respectfully by Linnaeus, 
and his account of British cattle, their races, proper 
treatment, etc., was, by all odds, the best which had 
appeared up to his time. The same gentleman, in his 
" New Improvements of Planting and Gardening," lays 
great stress upon a novel " invention for the more 
speedy designing of garden-plats," which is nothing 
more than an adaptation of the principle of the kalei 

* The Spectatws 414 and 477, which urge particular]}' a better 
taste in gardening, are dated 1712 ; and the first volume of the Icli- 
nographia (imder a difl'erent name, indeed) appeared in 1715. 

t This is averred of the translation of the (Economics of Xeno- 
phon, before cited in these papers, and published under Professor 
Bradley'^ name. 



EARLY ENGLISH GARDENERS. 193 

doscope. The latter book is the sole repi-esentative 
of this author's volmninous agricultural works in the 
Astor collection ; and, strange to say, there are only 
two (if we may believe IMr. Donaldson) in the library 
of the British Museum. 

I take, on this dreary November day, (with my Ca- 
tawbas blighted,) a rather ill-natured pleasure in read- 
ing how the Duke of Rutland, in the beginning of 
the last century, was compelled to " keep up fires from 
Lady-day to Michaelmas behind his sloped walls," in 
order to insm-e tlig ripening of his grapes ; yet winter 
grapes he had, and it was a great boast in that time. 
The quiet country - squires — such as Sir Roger de 
Coverley — had to content themselves with those old- 
fashioned fruits which would struggle successfully with 
out-of-door fogs. Fielding tells us that the garden of 
Mr. Wilson, where Parson Adams and the divine 
Fanny were guests, showed nothing more rare than an 
alley bordered with filbert-bushes.* 

In London and its neighborhood the gourmands fared 
better. Cucumbers, which in Charles's time never came 
in till the close of May, were ready in the shops of 
"Westminster (in the time of George I.) in early March. 
Melons were on sale, for those who could pay roundly, 
at the end of April ; and the season of cauliflowers, 

* Joseph Andrews, Bk. III. ch. 4, where Fielding, thief that he was, 
appiopriates the story that Xeuophou tells of Cyrus. 
13 



194 WET DAYS. 

which used to be Hmited to a single month, now reached 
over a term of six months. 

Mr. Pope, writing to Dr. Swift, somewhere about 1 730, 
says, — "I have more fruit - trees and kitchen - garden 
than you have any thought of; nay, I have good melons 
and pine-apples of my own growth." Nor was this a 
small boast; for Lady "Wortley Montague, describing 
her entertainment at the table of the Elector of Han- 
over, in 1716, speaks of "pines" as a fruit she had 
never seen before. 

Ornamental gardening, too, was now changing its 
complexion. Dutch William was dead and buried. 
Addison had written in praise of the natural disposition 
of the gardens of Fontainebleau, and, at his place near 
Eugby, was carrying out, so far as a citizen might, the 
suggestions of those papers to which I have already 
alluded. Milton was in better odor than he had been, 
and people had begun to realize that an arch-Puritan 
might have exquisite taste. Possibly, too, cultivated 
landholders had seen that charming garden - picture 
where the luxurious Tasso makes the pretty sorceress 
Armida spread her nets. 

Pope affected a respect for the views of Addison ; 
but his Twickenham garden was a very stiff affair. 
Bridgman was the first practical landscape-gardener 
who ventured to ignore old rules ; and he was followed 
closely by William Kent, a broken-down and unsuccess- 



JETHRO TULL. 195 

ful landscape-painter, Avho came into such vogue as a 
man of taste that he was employed to fashion the furni- 
ture of scores of coimtry-villas ; and Walpole * tells us 
that he was even beset by certain fine ladies to design 
Birthday gowns for them ; — " The one he dressed in 
a petticoat decorated with columns of the five orders ; 
the other, like a bronze, in a copper-colored satin, with 
ornaments of gold." 

Clermont, the charming home of the exiled Orleans 
family, shows vestiges of the taste of Kent, who always 
accredited very much of his love for the picturesque to 
the reading of Spenser. It is not often that the poet 
of the " Fairy Queene " is mentioned as an educator. 

Jethro Tull. 

AND now let us leave gardens for a while, to dis- 
cuss Mr. Jethro Tull, the great English cultivator 
of the early half of the eighteenth century. I suspect 
that most of the gentry of his tune, and cultivated peo- 
ple, ignored Mr. Tull, — he was so rash and so head- 
strong and so noisy. It is certain, too, that the edu- 
cated farmers, or, more strictly, the writing farmers, 
opened battle upon him, and used all their art to ward 
off his radical tilts vq^on their old methods of culture. 
And he fought back bravely ; I really do not think that 

* Wovhs of Earl of Orford, Vol. III. p. 490. 



196 WET DAYS. 

an editor of a partisan paper to-day could improve upon 
him, — in vigor, in personality, or in coarseness. 

Unfortunately, the biographers and encyclopaedists 
who followed upon his period have treated his name 
with a neglect that leaves but scanty gleanings for his 
personal history. His father owned landed property 
in Oxfordshire, and Jethro was a University-man ; he 
studied for the law, (which will account for his address 
in a wordy quarrel,) made the tour of Europe, returned 
to Oxfordshire, married, took the paternal homestead, 
and proceeded to carry out the new notions which he 
had gained in his Southern travels. Ill health drove 
him to France a second time, whence he returned once 
more, to occupy the famous " Prosperous Farm " in 
Berkshire ; and here he opened his batteries afresh 
upon the existing methods of farming. The gist of his 
proposed reform is expressed in the title of his book, 
" The Horse-hoeing Husbandry." He believed in the 
thorough tillage, at frequent intervals, of all field-crops, 
from wheat to turnips. To make this feasible, drilling 
was, of course, essential ; and to make it economical, 
horse-labor was requisite : the drill and the horse-hoe 
were only subsidiary to the main end of thorough 

TILLAGE. 

Sir Hugh Piatt, as Ave have seen, had before sug- 
gested dibbling, and Worlidge had contrived a drill ; 
but Tull gave force and point and practical efficacy to 



JETHRO TULL. 197 

their suggestions. He gives no credit, indeed, to these 
old gentlemen ; and it is quite possible that his theory 
may have been worked out from his own observations. 
He certainly gives a clear account of the growth of his 
belief, and sustains it by a great many droll notions 
about the physiology of plants, which would hardly be 
admissible in the botanies of to-day. 

Shall I give a sample ? 

" Leaves," he says, " are the parts, or bowels of a 
plant, which perform the same office to sap as the lungs 
of an animal do to blood ; that is, they purify or cleanse 
it of the recrements, or fuliginous steams, received in the 
circulation, being the mifit parts of the food, and per- 
haps some decayed particles which fly off the vessels 
through which blood and sap do pass respectively." 

It does not appear that the success of TuU upon 
" Prosperous Farm " was such as to give a large war- 
rant for its name. His enemies, indeed, alleged that 
he came near to sinking two estates on his system ; this, 
however, he stoutly denies, and says, "I propose no 
more than to keep out of debt, and leave my estate be- 
hind me better than I found it. Yet, owned it must be, 
that, had I, when I first began to make trials, known 
as much of the system as I do now, the practice of it 
would have been more profitable to me." Farmers in 
other parts of England, with lands better adapted to 
the new husbandry, certainly availed themselves of it, 



198 WET DAYS. 

very much to their advantage. TuU, like a great many 
earnest reformers, was ahnost always in difficulty with 
those immediately dependent on him ; over and over he 
insists upon the " inconveniency and slavery attending 
the exorbitant power of husbandry servants and labor- 
ers over their masters." He quarrels with their wages, 
and with the short period of their labor. Pray, what 
would Mr. Tull have thought, if he had dealt with the 
Drogheda gentlemen in black satin waistcoats, who are 
to be conciliated by the farmers of to-day ? 

I think I can fancy such an encounter for the quer- 
ulous old reformer. " Mike ! blast you, you booby, 
you 've broken my drill ! " And Mike, (putting his 
thumb deliberately in the armlet of his waistcoat,) 
" Meester Tull, it 's not the loikes o' me '11 be leestening 
to insoolting worrds. I '11 take me money, if ye plase." 
And with what a fury "Meester" Tull would have 
slashed away, after this, at " Equivocus," and all his 
newspaper-antagonists ! 

I wish I could believe that Tull always told the exact 
truth ; but he gives some accounts of the perfection to 
which he had brought his drill * to which I can lend 
only a most meagre trust ; and it is unquestionable that 
his theory so fevered his brain at last as to make him 
utterly contemptuous of all old-fashioned methods of 
procedure. In this respect he was not alone among 
* See Chap. VII. p. 104, Cobbetf s edition. 



JETHRO TULL. 199 

reformers. He stoutly affirmed that tillage would supply 
the lack of manure, and his neighbors currently reported 
that he was in the habit of dumping his manure-carts 
in the river. This charge Mr. Tull j&rmly denied, and 
I dare say justly. But I can readily believe that the 
riunors were current ; country-neighborhoods offer good 
starting-points for such lively scandal. The writer of 
tliis book has heard, on the best possible authority, that 
he is in the habit of planting shrubs with their roots in 
the air. 

In his loose, disputative way, and to magnify the im- 
portance of his own special doctrine, Tull affirms that 
the ancients, and Virgil particularly, urged tillage for the 
simple purpose of destroying weeds.* In this it seems 
to me that he does great injustice to our old friend 
Maro. Will tlie reader excuse a moment's dalliance 
with the Georgics again ? 

" Multiun adeo, rastris glebas qui frangit inertes^ 
Vimineasque traliit crates, j uvat arva ; . . . . 
Et qui proscisso quse suscitat aquore terga 
Riirsus in obliquura verso perrumpit aratro, 
Exercetque frequens telliu-em, atque imperat arvis." f 

That ^'■imperat'''' looks like something more than 

* Chap. IX. p. 136, Cobbett's edition. 

t " He does his land great service who breaks the sluggish clods with 
harrows, and drags over them the willow hurdles ; . . . . who tears 
up the ridges of his furrowed plain, and ploughs crosswise, and over 
and over again stirs his field, and with masterly hand subdues it." 



2C0 WET DAYS. 

weed-killing ; it looks like subjugation ; it looks like 
pulverization at the hands of an imperious master. 

But behind all of Tull's exaggerated pretension, and 
unaffected by the noisy exacerbation of his speech, 
there lay a sterling good sense, and a clear comprehen- 
sion of the existing shortcomings in agriculture, which 
gave to his teachings prodigious force, and an influence 
measured only by half a century of years. There were 
few, indeed, who adopted literally and fully his plans, or 
who had the hardihood to acknowledge the irate Jethro 
as a safe and practical teacher ; yet his hints and his 
example gave a stimulus to root-culture, and an atten- 
tion to the benefits arising from thorough and repeated 
tillage, that added vastly to the annual harvests of Eng- 
land. Bating the exaggerations I have alluded to, his 
views are still reckoned sound ; and though a hoed crop 
of wheat is somewhat exceptional, the drill is now al- 
most universal in the best cultivated districts of Great 
Britain and the Continent; and a large share of the 
forage-crops owe their extraordinary burden to horse- 
hoeing husbandry. 

Even the exaggerated claims of TuU have had their 
advocates in these last days ; and the energetic farmer 
of Lois-Weedon, in Northamptonshire, is reported to 
be growing heavy crops of wheat for a succession of 
years, without any supply of outside fertilizers, and rely- 
ing wholly upon repeated and perfect pulverization of 



JETHRO TULL. 201 

the soil.* And Mr. Way, the distinguished chemist of 
the Royal Society, in a paper on " The Power of Soils to 
absorb Manure," f propounds the question as follows : — 
" Is it likely, on theoretical considerations, that the air 
and the soil together can by any means be made to 
yield, without the application of manure, and year after 
year continuously, a crop of wheat of from thirty to 
thirty-five bushels per acre ? " And his reply is this : — 
" I confess I do not see why they should not do so." 
A practical farmer, however, (who spends only his wet 
days in-doors,) would be very apt to suggest here, that 
the validity of this dictum must depend very much on 
the original constituents of the soil. 

Under the lee of the Coombe Hills, on the extreme 
southern edge of Berkshire, and not far removed from 
the great highway leading from Bath to London, lies 
the farmery where this restless, petulant, sufiering, ear- 
nest, clear-sighted TuU put down the burden of life, a 
hundred and twenty years ago. The house is unfortu- 
nately largely modernized, but many of the out-build- 
ings remain unchanged ; and not a man thereabout, or 
in any other quarter, could tell me where the former 
occupant, who fought so bravely his fierce battle of the 
di'ill, lies buried. 

* It is ta be remarked, however, that the Rev. Mr. Smith, (farmer 
of Lois-Weedon,) by the distribution of his crop, avails himself virtu- 
ally of a clean fallow, every alternate year. 

t Transactions. Vol. XXX. p. 140. 



202 WET DAYS. 

Hanhury and Lancelot Brotvn. 

ABOUT the middle of the last century, there lived 
in the south of Leicestershire, in the parish of 
Church-Langton, an eccentric and benevolent clergy- 
man by the name of William Hanbury, who conceived 
the idea of establishing a great charity which was to be 
supported by a vast plantation of trees. To this end, 
he imported a great variety of seeds and plants from 
the Continent and America, established a nursery of 
fifty acres in extent, and published " An Essay on 
Planting, and a Scheme to make it Conducive to the 
Glory of God and the Advantage of Society." 

But the Reverend Hanbury was beset by aggressive 
and cold-hearted neighbors, — among them two strange 
old "gentlewomen," Mistress Pickering and Mistress 
Byrd, who malevolently ordered their cattle to be 
turned loose into his first plantation of twenty thousand 
young and thrifty trees. And not content with this, 
they served twenty-seven different copies of writs upon 
him in one day, for trespass. Of all this he gives de- 
tailed account in his curious history of the " Charitable 
Foundations at Church-Langton." He tells us that the 
" venomous rage " of these old ladies (who died shortly 
after, Avorth a million of dollars) did not even .4pare his 
dogs ; but that his pet spaniel and greyhound were 
cruelly killed by a table-fork thrust into their entrails. 



BANBURY AND LANCELOT BROWN. 203 

Nay, their game-keeper even buried two dogs alive, 
which belonged to his neighbor, Mr. Wade, a substan- 
tial grazier. His story of it is very Defoe-like and piti- 
ful : — "I myself heard them," he says, " ten days after 
they had been buried, and, seeing some people at a dis- 
tance, inquired what dogs they were. ' They are some 
dogs that are lost, Sir,' said they ; ' they have been lost 
some ti7ne.' I concluded only some poachers had been 
there early in the morning, and by a precipitate flight 
had left their dogs behind them. In short, the howling 
and' barking of these dogs was heard for near three 
weeks, when it ceased. Mr. Wade's dogs were missing, 
but he could not suspect those dogs to be his ; and the 
noise ceasing, the thoughts, wonder, and talking about 
them soon also ceased. Some time after, a person, being 
amongst the bushes where the howling was heard, dis- 
covered some disturbed earth, and the print of men's 
heels ramming it down again very close, and, seeing 
Mr. Wade's servant, told him he thought something had 
been buried there. ' Then,' said the man, '«'# is our 
dogs, and they have been buried alive. I icillgo and fetch 
a spade, and loill find them, if I dig all Caudle over.' 
He soon brought a spade, and upon removing the top 
earth, came to the blackthorns, and then to the dogs, 
the biggest of which had eat the loins, and greatest 
share of the hind parts, of the little one." 

The strange ladies who were guilty of this slaughter 



201 WET DAYS. 

of innocents showed " a dying blaze of goodness " by 
bequeathing twelve thousand pounds to charitable soci- 
eties ; and " thus ended," says Hanbury, " these two 
poor, unhappy, uncharitable, charitable old gentle- 
women." 

The good old man describes the beauty of plants 
and trees with the same delightful particularity which 
he spent on his neighbors and the buried dogs. 

I cannot anywhere learn whether or not the charity- 
plantation of Church-Langton is still thriving. 

About this very time, Lancelot Brown, who was for 
a long period the kitchen-gardener at Stowe, came into 
sudden notoriety by his disposition of the waters in 
Blenheim Park, where, in the short period of one 
week, he created perhajDS the finest artificial lake in 
the world. Its indentations of shore, its bordering 
declivities of wood, and the graceful swells of land 
dipping to its margin, remain now in very nearly the 
same condition in which Brown left them more than a 
hundred years ago. All over England the new man 
was sent for ; all over England he rooted out the mossy 
avenues, and the sharp rectangularities, and laid down 
his flowing lines of walks, and of trees. He (wisely) 
never contracted to execute his ov/n designs, and — 
from lack of facility, perhaps — he always employed 
assistants to draw his plans. But the quick eye which 
at first sight recognized the "capabilities " of a place, 



WILLIAM SHENSTONE. 205 

and which leaped to the recognition of its matured 
graces, was all his own. He was accused of sameness ; 
but the man who at one time held a thousand lovely 
landscapes unfolding in his thought could hardly give 
a series of contrasts Avithout startling affectations. 

I mention the name of Lancelot Brown, however, 
not to discuss his merits, but as the principal and 
largest illustrator of that taste in landscape-gardening 
which just now grew up in England, out of a new 
reading of Milton, out of the admirable essays of Ad- 
dison, out of the hints of Pope, out of the designs of 
Kent, and which was stimulated by Gilpin, by Horace 
Walpole, and, still more, by the delightful little land- 
scapes of Gainsborough. 

William Shenstone. 

TllNOUGH will be found of Mr. Brown, and of his 
J-^ stjde, in the professional treatises, upon whose 
province I do not now infringe. I choose rather, for 
the entertainment of my readers, if they will kindly 
find it, to speak of that sad, exceptional man, Wil- 
liam Shenstone, who, by the beauties which he made 
to appear on his paternal farm of Leasowes, fairly 
rivalled the best of the landscape-gardeners, — and 
who, by the graces and the tenderness which he lav- 
ished on his verse, made no mean rank for himself at a 



206 WET DAYS. 

time when people were reading the " Elegy " of Gray, 
the Homer of Pope, and the " Cato " of Addison. 

I think there can hardly be any doubt, howevei*, that 
poor Shenstone was a wretched fanner ; yet the Leas- 
owes was a capital grazing farm, when he took it in 
charge, within fair marketable distance of both Wor- 
cester and Birmingham. I suspect that he never put 
his fine hands to the plough-tail ; and his plaintive 
elegy, that dates from an April day of 1743, tells, I am 
sure, only the unmitigated truth : — 

"Again the laboring hind inverts the soil ; 

Again the merchant ploughs the tiimid wave; 
Another spring renews the soldier's toil, 
Andjinds me vacant in the rttral cave. " 

Shenstone, like many another of the lesser poets, 
was unfortunate in having Dr. Johnson for his biogra- 
pher.* It is hard to conceive of a man who would show 
less of tenderness for an elaborate parterre of flowers, 
or for a poet who affectedly parted his gray locks on one 

* Mrs. Piozzi says, " He [Dr. Johnson] hated to hear about pros- 
pects and views, and laying out ground, and taste in gardening; — 
' That was the best garden,' he said, ' which produced most roots and 
fruits; and that water was most to be prized which contained most 
fish.' Walking in a wood when it rained was, I think, the only rural 
image which pleased his fancy. He loved the sight of fine forest- 
trees, however, and detested Brighthelmstone Downs, ' because it was 
a country so truly desolate,' he said, ' that if one had a mind to hang 
one's self for desperation at being obliged to live there, it would be 
difficult to find a tree on which to fasten the rope.' " — Croker's Bos- 
well, Vol. n. p. 209. 



WILLIAM SHENSTONE 207 

side of his head, wore a crimson waistcoat, and warbled 
in anapaestics about kids and shepherds' crooks. Only 
fancy the great, snuffy, wheezing Doctor, with his hair- 
powder whitening half his 'shoulders, led up before 
some charming little extravaganza of Boucher, wherein 
all the njinphs are simpering marchionesses, with ro- 
settes on their high-heeled slippers that out-color the 
sky ! With what a " Faugh ! " the great gerund- 
grinder would thmnp his cane upon the floor, and go 
lumbering away ! And Shenstone, or rather his mem- 
017, caught the besom of just such a sneen 

But other critics were more kindly and appreciative ; 
among them, Dodsley the bookselling author, who 
wrote '• The Economy of Human Life," * (the " Pro- 
verbial Philosophy " of its day,) and Whately, who 
gave to the public the most elegant and tasteful dis- 
cussion of artificial scenery that was perhaps ever 
written. 

Slienstone studied, as much as so indolent a man 
ever could, at Pembroke College, Oxford. His parents 
died when he was young, leaving to him a very con- 
siderable estate, which fortunately some relative ad- 
ministered for him, until, owing to this supervisor's 
death, it lapsed into the poet's improvident hands. 
Even then a sensible tenant of his own name, and a 

* Dodsley was also the author of a stiQ" and unreadable poem on 
' Agriculture." 



208 WET DAYS. 

distant relative, managed very snugly the farm of 
Leasowes ; but when Shenstone came to live with him, 
neither house nor grounds were large enough for the 
joint occupancy of the poet, who was trailing his 
walks through the middle of the mowing, and of the 
tenant, who had his beeves to fatten and his rental to 
pay. 

So Shenstone became a farmer on his own account ; 
and, according to all reports, a very sorry account he 
made of it. The good soul had none of Mr. Tull's 
petulance and audacity with his servants; if the 
ploughman broke his gear, I suspect the kind bal- 
lad-master allowed him a holiday for the mending. 
The herdsman stared in astonishment to find the 
" beasts " ordered away from their accustomed graz- 
ing -fields. A new thicket had been jDlanted, which 
must not be disturbed ; the orchard was uprooted to 
give place to some parterre ; a fine bit of meadow was 
flowed with a miniature lake ; hedges were shorn away 
without mercy ; arbors, grottos, rustic seats. Arcadian 
temples, sprang up in all outlying nooks ; so that the 
annual product of the land came presently to be lim- 
ited, almost entirely, to the beauty of its disposition.* 

* Repton is somewhat severe in his condemnation of Leasowes and 
of Shenstone's taste, not, that I can perceive, because he objects to 
errors of detail, but because he ignores in tola the practicability of 
uniting farm-culture with any tasteful management of landscape. I 
have no doubt that Leasowes was a wretchedly managed farm eco- 



WILLIAM SHENSTONE. 209 

I think that the poet, unlike most, was never very 
thoroughly satisfied with his poems, and that, therefore, 
the vanity possessed him to vest the sense of beauty 
which he felt tingling in his blood in something more 
palpable than language. Hence came the charming 
walks and woods and waters of LeasoAves. With this 
ambition holding him and mastering him, what mat- 
tered a mouldy grain-crop, or a debt ? If he had only 
an ardent admirer of his walks, his wilderness, his 
grottos, — this was his customer. He longed for such, 
in troops, — as a poet longs for readers, and as a far- 
mer longs for sun and rain. 

And he had them. I fancy there was hardly a cul- 
tivated person in England, but, before the death of 
Shenstone, had heard of the rare beauty of his home 
of Leasowes. Lord Lyttelton, who lived near by, at 
the elegant seat of Hagley, brought over his guests 
to see what miracles the hare-brained, sensitive poet 
had wrought upon his farm. And I can fancy the 
proud, shy creature watching from his lattice the com- 
pany of distinguished guests, — maddened, if they look 
at his alcove from the wrong direction, — wondering 
if that shout that comes booming to his sensitive ear 
means admiration, or only an unappreciative surprise, 

nomically speaking; yet I see no reason to forbid tlie conjunction, 
under proper hands, of a gi'eat deal of landscape-beauty with a profit- 
ably conducted grazing-farm. 

14 



210 WET DAYS. 

— dwelling on the memory of the visit, as a poet 
dwells on the first public mention of his poem. In 
his " Egotisms," (well named,) he writes, — " Why re- 
pine ? I have seen mansions on the verge of Wales 
that convert my farm-house into a Hampton Court, and 
where they sjDeak of a glazed window as a great piece 
of magnificence. All things figure by comparison." 

And this reflection, with its flavor of philosophy, 
was, I dare say, a sweet morsel to him. He saw 'very 
little of the world in his later years, save that part of 
it which at odd intervals found its way to the delights 
of Leasowes ; indeed, he was not of a temper to meet 
the world upon fair temis. " The generality of man- 
kind," he cynically says, "are seldom in good humor 
but whilst they are imposing upon you in some shape 
or other." * 

Our farmer of Leasowes published a pastoral that 
was no way equal to the pastoral he wrote with trees, 
walks, and water upon his land ; yet there are few cul- 
tivated readers who have not some day met Avith it, 
and been beguiled by its mellifluous seesaw. How its 
jingling resonance comes back to me to-day from the 
" Reader " book of the High School ! 

" I have foimd out a gift for my fair; 

I have foimd where the wood-pigeons breed: 
But let me that plunder forbear; 

* Delachcd Thoii<j]d$ on Men and Manners: Wm. Shenstone. 



WILLIAM SHENSTONE. 211 

She ^vill say 't was a barbarous deed. 
For he ne'er could be true, she averred, 

Who could rob a poor bird of its young : 
And I loved her the more, when I heard 

Such tenderness fall from her tongue." 

And what a killing look over at the girl in the 
corner, in check gingham, with blue bows in her hair, 
as I read (always on the old school-benches), — 

" I have heard her with sweetness unfold 

How that pity was due to — a dove: 
That it ever attended the bold ; 

And she called it the sister of love. 
But her words such a pleasure convey, 

So much I her accents adore. 
Let her s{\eak, and whatever she say, 

Methinks I should love her the more." 

There is a rhythmic prettiness in this ; but it is the 
prettiness of a lover in his teens, and not the kind we 
look for from a man who stood five feet eleven in his 
stockings, and wore his own gray hair. Strangely 
enough, Shenstone had the physique of a ploughman 
or a prize-fighter, and with it the fine, sensitive brain 
of a woman ; a Greek in his refinements, and a Greek 
in indolence. I hope he gets on better in the other 
world than he ever did in this. 



SEVENTH DAY. 



John Abercrombie. 

~r BEGIN my day with a canny Scot, who was born 
-*- in Edinburgh in 1726, near which city his father 
conducted a large market-garden. As a youth, aged 
nineteen, John Abercrombie (for it is of him I make 
companion this wet morning) saw the Battle of Preston 
Pans, at which the Highlanders pushed the King's-men 
in defeat to the very foot of his father's garden-wall. 
Whether he shouldered a matchlock for the Castle-peo- 
ple and Sir John Hope, or merely looked over from the 
kale-beds at the victorious fighters for Prince Charley, 
I cannot learn ; it is certain only that before Culloden, 
and the final discomfiture of the Pretender, he avowed 
himself a good King's-man, and in many an after-year, 
over his pipe and his ale, told the story of the battle 
which surged wrathfully around his father's kale-garden 
by Preston Pans. 

But he did not stay long in Scotland ; he became gar- 



JOHN ABERCROMBIE. 213 

dener for Sir James Douglas, into whose family (below- 
stairs) he eventually married ; afterwards he had expe- 
rience in the royal gardens at Kew, and in Leicester 
Fields. Finally he became proprietor of a patch of 
ground in the neighborhood of London ; and his success 
here, added to his success in other service, gave him such 
reputation that he was one day waited upon (about the 
year 1770) by Mr. Davies, a London bookseller, who 
invited him to dine at an inn in Hackney ; and at the 
dinner he was introduced to a certain Oliver Goldsmith, 
an awkward man, who had published four years before 
a book called " The Vicar of Wakefield." JNIr. Davies 
thought John Abercrombie was competent to write a 
good practical work on gardening, and the Hackney 
dinner was intended to warm the way toward such a book. 
Dinners are sometimes given with such ends even now. 
The shrewd Mr. Davies was a little doubtful of Aber- 
crombie's style, but not at all doubtful of the style of the 
author of " The Traveller." Dr. Goldsmith was not a 
man averse to a good meal, where he was to meet a 
straightforward, out-spoken Scotch gardener ; and Mr. 
Davies, at a mellow stage of the dinner, brought forward 
his little plan, — which was that Abercrombie should 
prepare a treatise upon gardening, to be revised and 
put in shape by the author of " The Deserted Village." 
The dinner at Hackney was, I dare say, a good one ; the 
scheme looked promising to a man whose vegetable- 



214 WET DAYS. 

carts streamed every morning into London, and to the 
Doctor, mindful of his farm-retirement at the six-mile 
stone on the Edgeware Eoad ; so it was all arranged 
between them. 

But, like many a publisher's scheme, it miscarried. 
The Doctor perhaps saw a better bargain in the Lives 
of Bolingbroke and Parnell ; * or perhaps his appoint- 
ment as Professor of History to the Royal Academy put 
him too much upon his dignity. At any rate, the world 
has to regret a gardening-book in which the shrewd 
practical knowledge of Abercrombie would have been 
refined by the grace and the always alluring limpidity 
of the style of Goldsmith. 

I know that the cultivators pretend to spurn graces 
of manner, and aifect only a clumsy burden of language, 
under which, I am sony to say, the best agriculturists 
have most commonly labored; but if the transparent 
simplicity of Goldsmith had once been thoroughly in- 
fused with the practical knowledge of Abercrombie, 
what a book on gardening we should have had ! "WTiat 
a lush verdure of vegetables would have tempted us! 
What a wealth of perfume would have exuded from the 
flowers ! 

But the scheme proved abortive. Goldsmith said, " I 
think our friend Abercrombie can write better about 
plants than I can." And so doubtless he could, so far as 

* Published 1770-'71. 



JOHN ABERCROMBIE. 215 

knowledge of their habits went. Eight years after, 
Aberorombie prepared a book called " Every Man his 
own Gardener " ; but so doubtful was he of his own 
reputation, that he paid twenty pounds to Mr. Thomas 
Mawe, the fashionable gardener of the Duke of Leeds, 
for the privilege of placing Mr. Mawe's name upon the 
title-page. I am sorry to record such a scurvy bit of 
hypocrisy in so competent a man. The book sold, how- 
ever, and sold so well, that, a few years after, the elegant 
Mr. Mawe begged a visit from the nursery-man of Tot- 
tenham Court, whom he had never seen ; so Aberorom- 
bie goes down to the seat of the Duke of Leeds, and 
finds his gardener so bedizened with powder, and wear- 
ing such a grand air, that he mistakes him for his Lord- 
ship ; but it is a mistake, we may readily believe, which 
the elegant Mr. IMawe forgives, and the two gardeners 
become capital friends. 

Abercrombie afterward published many works under 
his own name ; * among these was " The Gardener's 
Pocket Journal," which maintained an unflagging popu- 
larity as a standard book for a period of half a century. 
This hardy Scotchman lived to be eighty ; and when he 
could work no longer, he was constantly afoot among 
the botanical gardens about London. At the last it was 
a fall " down-stairs in the dark " that was the cause of 
death ; and fifteen days after, as his quaint biographers 
* Johnson enumerates fifteen. 



216 WET DAYS. 

tell us, " he expired, just as the clock upon St. Paul's 
struck twelve, — between April and May": as if the 
ripe old gardener could not tell M-hich of these twin -gar- 
den - months he loved the best ; and so, with a foot 
planted in each, he made the leap into the realm of eter- 
nal spring. 

A noticeable fact in regard to this out-of-door old 
gentleman is, that he never took "doctors'-stufF" in his 
life, until the time of that fatal fall in the dark. He 
was, however, an inveterate tea-drinker ; and there was 
another aromatic herb (I write this with my pipe in my 
mouth) of which he was, up to the very last, a most 
ardent consumer. 

A Philosopher and Two Poets. 

N the year 1766 was published for the first time a 
posthumous work by John Locke, the great philos- 
opher and the good Christian, entitled, " Observations 
upon the Growth and Culture of Vines and Olives," * 
— written, very likely, after his return from France, 
down in his pleasant Essex home, at the seat of Sir 
Francis Mash am. Were the book by me, I should love 
to give the reader a sample of the manner in which 



* Most of tlie bibliographers have omitted mention of this treatise. 
It may be found in the collected edition of Locke's works, London, 
]S-23, Vol. X. 



A PHILOSOPHER AND TWO POETS. 217 

the author of " Aii Essay concerning Human Under- 
standing " Avrote regarding horticultural matters. No 
one can doubt but there is wisdom in it. '' I believe 
you think me," he writes in a private letter to a friend, 
" too proud to undertake anything wherein I should 
acquit myself but unworthily." This is a sort of pride 
— not very common in our day — which does ?iot go 
before a fall. 

I name a poet next, — not because a great poet, for 
he was not, nor yet because he wrote "The English 
Garden," * for there is sweeter garden-perfume in many 
another poem of the day that does not pique our curi- 
osity by its title. But the Reverend William Mason, if 
not among the foremost of poets, was a man of most 
kindly and liberal sympathies. He was a devoted Wliig, 
at a time when Whiggism meant friendship for the 
American Colonists ; and the open expression of this 
friendship cost him his place as a Royal Chaplain. I 
will remember this longer than I remember his " English 
Garden," — longer than I remember his best couplet 
of verse : — 

" While through the west, where sinks the crimson day, 
Meek twilight slowly sails, and waves her banners gray." 

It was alleged, indeed, by those who loved to say ill- 

* Of which the first book was published in 1772. This author is to 
be distinguished from George Mason, who in 1768 published An Essay 
on Design in Gardcniiui. 



218 WET DAYS. 

natured tilings, (Horace Walpole among them,) that in 
the later years of his life he forgot his first love of Lib- 
eralism and became politically conservative. But it 
must be remembered that the good poet lived into the 
time when the glut and gore of the French Revolution 
made people hold their breath, and when every man 
who lifted a humane plaint against the incessant creak 
and crash of the guillotine was reckoned by all mad re- 
formers a conservative. I think, if I had lived in that 
day, I should have been a conservative, too, — however 
much the pretty and bloody Desmoulins might have 
made faces at me in the newspapers. 

I can find nothing in Mason's didactic jioem to quote. 
There are tasteful suggestions scattered through it, bet- 
ter every way than his poetry. The grounds of his vic- 
arage at Aston must have offered charming loitering- 
places. I will leave him idling there, — perhaps con- 
ning over some letter of his friend the poet Gray ; j^er- 
haps lounging in the very alcove where he had inscribed 
this verse of the " Elegy," — 

" Here scattered oft, the loveliest of the year, 

By hands unseen, are showers of violets fonnd ; 
The redbreast loves to build and warble here, 
And little footsteps lightly print the ground." 

If, indeed, he had known how to strew such gems 
through his " English Garden," we should have had a 
poem that would have outshone " The Seasons." 



A PHILOSOPHER AND TWO POETS. 219 

And this mention reminds me, that, although I have 
slipped past his period, I have said no word as yet of 
the Roxburgh poet ; but he shall bo neglected no longer. 
(The big book, my boy, upon the third shelf, with a 
worn back, labelled Tiiomsox.) 

This poet is not upon the gardeners' or the agricul- 
tural lists. One can find no farm-method in him, — in- 
deed, little method of any sort ; there is no description 
of a garden carrying half the details that belong to 
Tasso's garden of Armida, or Rousseau's in the letter 
of St. Pi-eux.* And yet, as we read, how the counti-y, 
with its woods, its valleys, its hill-sides, its swains, its toil- 
ing cattle, comes swooping to our vision ! The leaves 
rustle, the birds warble, the rivers roar a song. The 
sun beats on the plains ; the winds carry waves into 
tlie grain ; the clouds plant shadows on the mountains. 
The minuteness and the accuracy of his observation 
are something wonderful ; if farmers should not study 
him, our young poets may. He never puts a song in 
the throat of a jay or a wood-dove ; he never makes a 
mother-bird break out in bravuras ; he never puts a 
sickle into green grain, or a trout in a slimy brook ; he 
could picture no orchis growing on a hill-side, or colum- 
bine nodding in a meadow. If the leaves shimmer, you 
may be sure the sun is shining; if a primrose light- 
ens on the view, you may be sure there is some covert 

* Lettre XL Liv. IV. Nouctlk Ileluisc. 



220 WET DAYS. 

which the primroses love ; and never by any license 
does a white flower come blushing into his poem. 

I will not quote, where so much depends upon the at- 
mosphere which the poet himself creates as he waves 
his enchanter's wand. Over all the type his sweet 
power compels a rural heaven to lie reflected ; I go 
from budding spring to blazing summer at the turning 
of a page ; on all the meadows below me (though it is 
March) I see ripe autumn brooding with golden wings; 
and winter howls and screams in gusts, and tosses tem- 
pests of snow into my eyes — out of the book my boy 
has just now brought me. 

One verse, at least, I will cite, — so full it is of all 
pastoral feeling, so brimming over with the poet's pas- 
sion for the country : it is from "■ The Castle of Indo- 
lence " : — 

" I care not. Fortune, what you me deny : 
You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace ; 
You cannot shut the windows of the sky, 
Through which Aurora shows her brightening face ; 
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace 
The woods and lawns, by living stream at eve: 
Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace, 
And I their toys to the great children leave ; 
Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can me bereave." 



LORD KAMES. 221 



Lord Karnes. 

A NOTHER Scotchman, Lord Karnes, (Henry Home 
-^-^ by name,) who was Senior Lord of Sessions in 
Scotland about the year 1760, was best known in his 
own day for his discussion of " The Principles of Equi- 
ty " ; he is known to the literary world as the author of 
an elegant treatise upon the " Elements of Criticism " ; 
I beg leave to introduce him to my readers to-day as 
a sturdy, practical farmer. The book, indeed, which 
serves for his card of introduction, is called " The Gen- 
tleman Fanner " ; * but we must not judge it by our 
experience of the class who wear that title nowadays. 
Lord Kames recommends no waste of money, no ex- 
travagant architecture, no mere prettinesses. He talks 
of the plough in a way that assures us he has held it 
some day with his own hands. People are taught, he 
says, more by the eye than the ear ; show them good 
culture, and they will follow it. 

As for what were called the principles of agriculture, 
he found them involved in obscurity ; he went to the 
book of Nature for instruction, and commenced, like 
Descartes, with doubting everything. He condemns 
the Roman husbandry as fettered by superstitions, and 
gives a piquant sneer at the absurd rhetoric and vcrbos- 

* First published in 1766. 



222 WET DAYS. 

ity of Varro.* Nor is lie any more tolerant of Scotch 
superstitions. He declares against wasteful and care- 
less farming in a way that reminds us of our good friend 
Judge ■ , at the last county-show. 

He urges good ploughing as a primal necessity, and 
insists upon the use of the roller for rendering the sur- 
face of wheat-lands compact, and so retaining the moist- 
ure ; nor does he attempt to reconcile this declaration 
with the Tull theory of constant trituration. A great 
many excellent Scotch farmers still hold to the views 
of his Lordship, and believe in " keeping the sap " in 
fresh-tilled land by heavy rolling ; and so far as regards 
a wheat or rye crop vipon light lands, I think the weight 
of opinion, as well as of the rollers, is with them. 

Lord Karnes, writing before the time of draining- 
tile, dislikes open ditches, by reason of their interfer- 
ence with tillage, and does not trust the durability of 
brush or stone underdrains. He relies upon ridging, 
and the proper disposition of open furrows, in the old 
Greek v/ay. Turnips he commends without stint, and 
the Tull system of their culture. Of clover he thinks 
as highly as the great English farmer, but does not be- 
lieve in his notion of economizing seed : " Idealists," 
he says, " talk of four pounds to the acre ; but when 
sown for cutting green, I would advise twenty -four 

* Citing, in confirmation, that passage commenciug, — " Nunc dkam 
agri quibus rebus colantiir" etc. 



LORD KAMES. 223 

pounds." This amount will seem a little startling, I 
fancy, even to farmers of our day. 

He advises strongly the use of oxen in place of 
horses for all farm-labor ; they cost less, keep for less, 
and sell for more ; and he enters into arithmetical calcu- 
lations to establish his propositions. He instances Mr. 
Uurke, who ploughs with four oxen at Beaconsfield. 
How drolly it sounds to hear the author of " Letters on 
a Regicide Peace " cited as an authority in practical 
farming ! He still further urges his ox-working scheme, 
on grounds of public economy : it will cheapen food, 
forbid importation of oats, and reduce wages. Again, 
he recommends soiling,* by all the arguments which are 
used, and vainly used, with us. He shows the worth- 
lessness of manure dropped upon a parched field, com- 
pared with the same duly cared for in court or stable ; 
he proposes movable sheds for feeding, and enters into 
a computation of the weight of green clover which will 
be consmned in a day by horses, cows, or oxen : " a 
horse, ten Dutch stone daily ; an ox or cow, eight stone ; 
ten horses, ten oxen, and six cows, two hundred and 
twenty-eight stone per day," — involving constant cart- 
age : still he is con\anced of the profit of the method. 

His views on feeding ordinary store-cattle, or accus- 
toming them to change of food, are eminently prac- 
ticaL After speaking of the desirableness of provid- 

* Pp. 177-179, edition of 1802, Edinburgh. 



224 WET DAYS. 

ing a good stock of vegetables, he continues, — " And 
yet, after all, how many indolent farmers remain, who 
for want of spring food are forced to turn their cattle 
out to grass before it is ready for pasture ! which not 
only starves the cattle, but lays the grass-roots open to 
be parched by sun and wind." 

Does not this sound as if I had clipped it from the 
" Country Gentleman " of last week ? And yet it was 
written nearly ninety years ago, by one of the most 
accomplished Scotch judges, and in his eightieth year, 
— another Varro, packing his luggage for his last voy- 
age. 

One gi-eat value of Lord Karnes's talk lies in the 
particularity of his directions : he does not despise 
mention of those minutiae a neglect of which makes so 
many books of agricultural instruction utterly useless. 
Thus, in so small a matter as the sowing of clover- 
seed, he tells how the thumb and finger should be 
held, for its proper distribution ; in stacking, he directs 
how to bind the thatch ; he tells how mown grass 
should be raked, and how many hours spread ; * and 
his directions for the making of clover-hay could not 
be improved upon this very summer. " Stir it not the 
day it is cut. Turn it in the swath the forenoon of the 
next day ; and in the afternoon put it up in small 
cocks. The third day put two cocks into one, enlarg- 

* Pp. 166, 167. 



LORD KAMES. 225 

ing every day the cocks till they are ready for the 
tramp rick [temporary field-stack]." The reader will 
not fail to remark how nearly this method agrees with 
the one cited in my First Day, from the treatise of 
Heresbach. 

A small portion of his book is given np to the dis- 
cussion of the theory of agriculture ; but he fairly 
warns his readers that he is wandering in the dark. 
If all theorists were as honest ! He deplores the ig- 
norance of Tull in asserting that plants feed on earth ; 
air and water alone, in his opinion, furnish the supply 
of plant-food. All plants feed alike, and on the same 
material ; degeneracy appearing only in those which 
are not native : white clover never deteriorates in Eng- 
land, nor bull-dogs. 

But I will not linger on his theories. He is repre- 
sented to have been a kind and humane man ; but this 
did not forbid a hearty relish (appearing often in his 
book) for any scheme which promised to cheapen labor. 
" The people on landed estates," he says, " are trusted 
by Providence to the owner's care, and the proprietor 
is accountable for the management of them to the 
Great God, who is the Creator of both." It does not 
seem to have occurred to the old gentleman that some 
day people might decline to be " managed." 

He gave the best proof of his practical tact, in the 
conduct of his estate of Blair-Drunnnond, — uniting 

15 



226 WET DAYS. 

there all the graces of the best landscape-gardening 
with profitable returns. 

I take leave of him with a single excerpt from his 
admirable chapter on Gardening in the " Elements of 
Criticism " : — " Other fine arts may be perverted to 
excite irregular, and even vicious emotions ; but gar- 
dening, which inspires the purest and most refined 
pleasures, cannot fail to promote every good affection. 
The gayety and harmony of mind it produceth inclin- 
eth the spectator to communicate his satisfaction to 
others, and to make them happy as he is himself, and 
tends naturally to establish in him a habit of hmnanity 
and benevolence." 

It is himiiliating to reflect that a thievish orator at 
one of our Agricultural Fairs might appropriate page 
after page out of the " Gentleman Farmer" of Lord 
. Karnes, written in the middle of the last century, and 
the county-paper, and the aged directors, in clean shirt- 
collars and dress-coats, would be full of praises " of 
the enlightened views of our esteemed fellow-citizen." 
And yet at the very time when the critical Scotch 
judge was meditating his book, there was erected a 
land light-house, called Dunston Column, upon Lincoln 
Heath, to guide night travellers over a great waste of 
land that lay a half-day's ride south of Lincoln. And 
when Lady Robert Manners, who had a seat at Blox- 
holme, wished to visit Lincoln, a groom or two were 



CLARIDGE, MILLS, AND MILLER. 227 

sent out the morning before to explore a good path, 
and families were not unfreqnently lost for days * to- 
gether in crossing the heath. This same heath — 
made up of a light fawn-colored sand, lying on " dry, 
thirsty stone " — was, twenty years since at least, bloom- 
ing all over with rank, dark lines of turnips ; trim, low 
hedges skirted the level highways ; neat farm-cottages 
were flanked with great saddle-backed ricks ; thou- 
sands upon thousands of long-woolled sheep cropped 
the luxiu'iant pasturage, and the Dunston column was 
but an idle monument of a waste that existed no 
longer. 



Claridge, Mills ^ and Miller. 

ABOUT the tune of Lord Kames's establishment 
at Blair-Drimimond, or perhaps a little earlier, 
a certain Master Claridge published "The Country 
Calendar ; or. The Shepherd of Banbury's Rules to 
know of the Change of the Weather." It professed 
to be based upon forty years' experience, and is said 
to have met with great favor. I name it only be- 
cause it embodies these old couplets, which still lead a 
vagabond life up and down the pages of country- 
almanacs : — 

* Sec Article of Philip Pussy, ]\[. P., iu Transactions of Oie Ruyal 
Society, Vol. XIV. 



228 WET DAYS. 

" If the grass grows in Janiveer, 
It grows the worst for 't all the year." 

" The Welshman had rather see his dam on the bier 
Than to see a fair Februeer." 

" When April blows his horn, 
It 's good both for haj' and corn." 

" A cold May and a windy 
Makes a full barn and a findy." 

" A swarm of bees in May 
Is worth a load of hay ; 
But a swarm in July 
Is not worth a fly." 

Will any couplets of Tennyson reap as large a 
fame ? 

About the same period, John Mills, a Fellow of the 
Royal Society, published a work of a totally different 
character, — ^ being very methodic, very full, very clear. 
It was distributed through five volumes. He enforces 
the teachings of Evelyn and Duhamel, and is com- 
mendatory of the views of Tull. The Rotherham 
plough is figured in his work, as well as thirteen of 
the natural grasses. He speaks of potatoes and turnips 
as established crops, and enlarges upon their impor- 
tance. He clings to the Virgilian theory of small 
farms, and to the better theory of thorough tillage. 

In 1759 was issued the seventh edition of Miller's 



CLARIDGE, MILLS, AND MILLER. 229 

" Gardener's Dictionary," * in which was for the first 
time adopted (in English) the classical system of Lin- 
naeus. If I have not before alluded to Philip Miller, 
it is not because he is undeserving. He was a cor- 
respondent of the chiefs in science over the Continent 
of Europe, and united to his knowledge a rare practical 
skill. He was superintendent of the famous Chelsea 
Gardens of the Apothecaries Company. He lies 
buried in the Chelsea Church-yard, where the Fellows 
of the Linnaean and Horticultural Societies of London 
have erected a monument to his memory. Has the 
reader ever sailed up the Thames, beyond Westmin- 
ster ? And does he remember a little spot of garden- 
ground, walled in by dingy houses, that lies upon the 
right bank of the river near to Chelsea Hospital? 
K he can recall two gaunt, flat-topped cedars which 
sentinel the walk leading to the river - gate, he will 
have the spot in his mind, where, nearly two hundred 
years ago, and a full century before the Kew parterres 
were laid down, the Chelsea Garden of the Apothe- 
caries Company was established. It was in the open 
country then ; and even Philip Miller, in 1722, walked 
to his work between hedge - rows, where sparrows 
chirped in spring, and in winter the fieldfare chat- 
tered : but the town has swallowed it ; the city-smoke 
has starved it; even the marble image of Sir Hans 

* First published in 1724. 



230 WET DAYS. 

Sloane in its centre is but the mummy of a statue. 
Yet in tlie Physic Garden there are trees struggling 
still which Philip Miller planted; and I can readily 
believe, that, when the old man, at seventy - eight, 
(through some quarrel with the Apothecaries,) took 
his last walk to the river-bank, he did it with a sink- 
ing at the heart which kept by him till he died. 

Thomas WJiateli/, 

COME now to speak of Thomas Whately, to whom 
I have already alluded, and of whom, fi'om the 
scantiness of all record of his life, it is possible to say 
only very little. He lived at Nonsuch Park, in Surrey, 
not many miles from London, on the road to Epsom. 
He was engaged in public affairs, being at one time 
secretary to the Earl of Suffolk, and also a member of 
Parliament But I enroll him in my wet-day service 
simply as the author of the most appreciative and most 
tasteful treatise upon landscape-gardening which has 
ever been written, — not excepting either Price or 
Repton. It is entitled, " Observations on Modern 
Gardening," and was first published in 1770. It was 
the same year translated into French by Latapie, and 
was to the Continental gardeners the firet revelation 
of the graces which belonged to English cultivated 
landscape. In the course of the book he gives vivid 



THOMAS WHATELY. 231 

descriptions of Blenheim, Hagley, Leasowes, Clare- 
mont, and several other well-known British places. 
He treats separately of Parks, Water, Famis, Gar- 
dens, Ridings, etc., illustrating each with delicate and 
tender transcripts of natural scenes. Now he takes 
us to the cliffs of Matlock, and again to the farm-flats 
of Woburn. His criticisms upon the places reviev/ed 
are piquant, flill of rare apprehension of the most 
delicate natural beauties, and based on principles 
which every man of taste must accept at sight. As 
you read him, he does not seem so much a theorizer 
or expounder as he does the simple interpreter of 
graces which had escaped your notice. His sugges- 
tions come upon you with such a momentum of truth- 
fulness, that you cannot stay to challenge them. 

There is no argumentation, and no occasion for it. 
On such a bluflf he tells us wood should be planted, 
and we wonder that a hundred people had not said 
the same thing before ; on such a river-meadow the 
grassy level should lie open to the sun, and we wonder 
who could ever have doubted it. Nor is it in matters 
of taste alone, I think, that the best things we hear 
seem always to have a smack of oldness in them, — 
as if we remembered their virtue. " Capital ! " we say : 
" but has n't it been said before ? " or, " Precisely ! 
I wonder I did n't do or say the same thing myself." 
Whenever you hear such criticisms upon any perform- 



232 WET DAYS. 

ance, you may be sure that it has been directed by a 
sound instinct. It is not a sort of criticism any one 
is apt to make upon flashy rhetoric, or upon flash gar- 
dening. 

Whately alludes to the analogy between landscape- 
painting and landscape-gardening : the true artists in 
either pursuit aim at the production of rich pictorial 
effects, but their means are different. Does the 
painter seek to give steepness to a declivity ? — then 
he may add to his shading a figure or two toiling up. 
The gardener, indeed, cannot plant a man there ; but 
a copse upon the simimit will add to the apparent 
height, and he may indicate the difficulty of ascent 
by a hand-rail running along the path. The painter 
will extend his distance by the diminuendo of his 
mountains, or of trees stretching toward the horizon : 
the gardener has, indeed, no handling of successive 
moimtains, but he may increase apparent distance by 
leafy avenues leading toward the limit of vision ; he 
may even exaggerate the effect still further by so grad- 
uating the size of his trees as to make a counterfeit 
perspective. 

When I read such a book as this of Whately's, — 
so informed and leavened as it is by an elegant taste, 
— I am most painfully impressed by the shortcomings 
of very much which is called good landscape-garden- 
ing with us. As if serpentine walks, and glimpses of 



THOMAS WHATELY. 233 

elaborated turf-ground, and dots of exotic evergreens 
in little circlets of spaded earth, compassed at all those 
broad effects which a good designer should keep in 
mind ! TVe are gorged with petit-inmtre-ism, and pretty 
littlenesses of all kinds. We have the daintiest of 
walks, and the rarest of shrubs, and the best of drain- 
age; but of those grand, bold effects which at once 
seize upon the imagination, and inspire it with new wor- 
ship of Nature, we have great lack. In private grounds 
we cannot of course command the opportunity which 
the long tenure under British privilege gives ; but the 
conservators of public parks have scope and verge ; 
let them look to it, that their resources be not wasted 
in the niceties of mere gardening, or in elaborate ar- 
chitectural devices. Banks of blossoming shrubs and 
tangled wild vines and labyrinthine walks will count 
for nothing in park - effect, when, fifly years hence, 
the scheme shall have ripened, and hoary pines pile 
along the ridges, and gaunt single trees spot here 
and there the glades, to invite the noontide wayfarer. 
A true artist should keep these ultimate effects ahvays 
in his eye, — effects that may be greatly impaired, if 
not utterly sacrificed, by an injudicious multiplication 
of small and meretricious beauties, which in no way 
conspire to the grand and final poise of the scene. 

But I must not dwell upon so enticing a topic, or 
my wet day will run over into sunshine. One word 



234 WET DAYS. 

more, however, I have to say of the personality of 
the author who has suggested it. The reader of 
Sparks's Works and Life of Franklin may remember, 
that, in the fourth volume, under the head of " Hutch- 
inson's Letters," the Doctor details difficulties which 
he fell into in connection with " certain papers " he 
obtained indirectly from one of His Majesty's officials, 
and communicated to Thomas Gushing, Speaker of 
the House of Representatives of Massachusetts Bay. 
The difficulty involved others besides the Doctor, and 
a duel came of it between William Whately and Mr. 
Temple. This William Whately was the brother of 
Thomas Wliately, — the author in question, — and 
secretary to Lord Grenville,* in which capacity he 
died in 1772.f The " papers " alluded to were letters 
from Governor Hutchinson and others, expressing 
sympathy with the British Ministry in their efforts 
to enforce a grievous Colonial taxation. It was cur- 
rently supposed that Mr. Secretary Whately was the 
recipient of these letters; and upon their being made 
public after his death, Mr. Whately, his brother and 
executor, conceived that Mr. Temple was the instru- 
ment of their transfer. Hence the duel. Dr. Frank- 
lin, however, by public letter, declared that this alle- 
gation was ill-founded, but would never reveal the 

* I find hint named, in Dodsley's Animal Register for 1771, " Keeper 
of His Majesty's Private Roads." 

t Loudon makes an error in giving 1780 as tlie year of his death. 



HORACE WALPOLE. 235 

name of the party to whom he was indebted. The 
Doctor lost his place of Postmaster-General for the 
Colonies, and was egregiously insulted by Wedder- 
bm-n in open Council; but he could console himself 
with the friendship of such men as Lawyer Dunning, 
(one of the susjiected authors of " Junius,") and with 
the eulogium of Lord Chatham. 

Horace Walpole. 

fT^HERE are three more names belonging to this 
-"- period, which I shall bring under review, to finish 
up my day. These are Horace Walpole, (Lord Or- 
ford,) Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith. Wal- 
pole was the proprietor of Strawberry Hill, and wrote 
upon gardening : Burke was the owner of a noble farm 
at Beaconsfield, which he managed with rare sagacity : 
Goldsmith coidd never claim land enough to dig a 
grave upon, until the day he was buried ; but he wrote 
the story of " The Vicar of Wakefield," and the sweet 
poem of " The Deserted Village." 

I take a huge pleasure in dipping from time to time 
into the books of Horace Walpole, and an almost equal 
pleasure in cherishing a hearty contempt for the man. 
With a certain native cleverness, and the tact of a 
showman, he paraded his resources, whether of garden, 
or villa, or memory, or ingenuity, so as to carry a larger 



23 G WET DAYS. 

reputation for ability than he ever has deserved. His 
money, and the distinction of his father, gave him an 
association with cultivated people, — artists, politicians, 
poets, — which the metal of his own mind would never 
have found by reason of its own gravitating power. 
He courted notoriety in a way that would have made 
him, if a poorer man, the toadying Boswell of some 
other Johnson giant, and, if very poor, the welcome 
buffoon of some gossiping journal, who would never 
weary of contortions, and who would brutify himself 
at the death, to kindle an admiring smile. 

He writes pleasantly about painters, and condescend- 
ingly of gardeners and gardening. Of the special 
beauties of Strawberry Hill he is himself historiog- 
rapher ; elaborate copper plates, elegant paper, and 
a particularity that is ludicrous, set forth the charms 
of a villa which never sujDplied a single incentive to 
correct taste, or a single scene that has the embalm- 
ment of genius. He tells us grandly how this room 
was hung with crimson, and that other with gold ; how 
" the tea - room was adorned with green paper and 
prints, .... on the hearth, a large green vase of 
German ware, with a spread eagle, and lizards for 
handles," — which vase (if the observation be not 
counted disloyal by sensitive gentlemen) miist have 
been a very absurd bit of pottery. " On a shelf and 
brackets are two pot-pourris of Nankin china; two 



HORACE WALPOLE. 237 

pierced blue and white basons of old Delft ; and two 
sceaus \_sic] of coloured Seve ; a blue and white vase 
and cover; and two old Fayence bottles." 

"\^nien a man writes about his own furniture in this 
style for large type and quarto, we pity him more than 
if he had kept to such fantastic nightmares as the 
" Castle of Otranto." The Earl of Orford speaks in 
high terms of the literary abilities of the Earl of 
Bath : have any of my readers ever chanced to see 
any literary work of the Earl of Bath ? If not, I will 
supply the omission, in the shape of a ballad, " to the 
tune of a fonner song by George Bubb Doddington." 
It is entitled, " Strawberry Hill." 

" Some cry up Gunnersburj^ 

For Sion some declare ; 
And some say that with Chiswick House 

No villa can compare. 
But ask the beaux of Middlesex, 

Who know the country well, 
If Strawb'ry Hill, if Strawb'ry Hill 

Don't bear away the bell ? 

" Since Denham sung of Cooper's, 

There 's scarce a hill around 
But what in song or ditty 

Is turned to fairy gi-ound. 
Ah, peace be with their memories ! 

I wish them wondrous well ; 
But Strawb'iy Hill, but Strawb'ry Hill 

Must bear awav the bell." 



238 WET DAYS. 

It is no way surprising that a noble poet capable of 
writing such a ballad should have admired the villa of 
Horace Walpole : it is no way surprising that a propri- 
etor capable of admiring such a ballad should have 
printed his own glorification of Strawberry Hill. 

I am not insensible to the easy grace and the piq- 
uancy of his letters ; no man could ever pour more de- 
lightful twaddle into the ear of a great friend ; no man 
could more delight in doing it, if only the friend were 
really great. I am aware that he was highly cultivated, 
— that he had observed widely at home and abroad, — ■ 
that he was a welcome guest in distinguished circles ; 
but he never made or had a sterling friend ; and the 
news of the old man's death caused no severer shock 
than if one of his Fayence pipkins had broken. 

But what most irks me is the absurd dilettanteism 
and presumption of the man. He writes a tale as if 
he were giving dignity to romance ; he applauds an 
artist as Dives might have thrown crumbs to Lazarus ; 
vain to the last degree of all that he wrote or said, he 
was yet too fine a gentleman to be called author ; if 
there had been a way of printing books, without recourse 
to the vulgar media of type and paper, — a way of which 
titled gentlemen could conunand the monopoly, — I 
think he would have written more. As I turn over the 
velvety pages of his works, and look at his catalogues, 
his hon-mots. his drawings, his affectations of magnifi- 



EDMUND BURKE. 239 

cence, I seem to see the fastidious old man shufilino- 
with gouty step up and down, from drawing-room to li- 
brary, — stopping here and there to admire some newly 
arri\ed bit of pottery, — pulling out his golden snuff- 
box, and whisking a delicate pinch into his old nostrils, 
— then dusting his affluent shirt-frill with the tips of his 
dainty fingers, ^\dth an air of gratitude to Providence 
for having created so fine a gentleman as Horace Wal- 
pole, and of gratitude to Horace Walpole for having 
created so fine a place as Strawberry Hill. 

Edmund Burke. 

X TURN from this ancient specimen of titled elegance 
-*- to a consideration of Mr. Burke, with nmch the 
same relief with which I would go out from a perfumed 
dra^ving-room into the breezy air of a June morning. 
Lord Karnes has told us that Mr. Burke preferred oxen 
to horses for field-labor ; and we have Burke's letters 
to his bailiff, showing a nice attention to the economies 
of farming, and a complete mastery of its working de- 
tails. But more than anywhere else does his agricul- 
tural sagacity declare itself in his " Thoughts and De- 
tails on Scarcity." * 

Will the reader pardon me the transcript of a pas- 
sage or two ? " It is a perilous thing to try experiments 

* Presented to William Pitt, 1795. 



240 WET DAYS. 

on the farmer. The farmer's capital (except in a few 
persons, and in a very few places) is far more feeble 
than is commonly imagined. The trade is a very poor 
trade ; it is subject to great risks and losses. The capital, 
such as it is, is turned but once in the year ; in some 
branches it requires three years before the money is 
paid ; I believe never less than three in the turnip and 

grass-lalid course It is very rare that the most 

prosperous farmer, counting the value of his quick and 
dead stock, the interest of the money he turns, together 
with his own wages as a bailiff or overseer, ever does 
make twelve or fifteen pe?- centum by the year on his 
capital. In most parts of England which have fallen 
within my observation, I have rarely known a farmer 
who to his own trade has not added some other employ- 
ment or traffic, that, after a course of the most unre- 
mitting parsimony and labor, and persevering in his 
business for a long course of years, died worth more 
than paid his debts, leaving his posterity to continue in 
nearly the same equal conflict between industry and 
want in which the last predecessor, and a long line of 
predecessors before him, lived and died." 

In confirmation of this last statement, I may mention 
that Samuel Ireland, wi-iting in 1792, (" Pictm-esque 
Views on the River Thames,") speaks of a farmer named 
VYapshote, near Chertsey, whose ancestors had resided 
on the place ever since the time of Alfred the Great ; 



EDMUND BURKE. 241 

and amid all the chances and changes of centuries, not 
one of the descendants had either bettered or marred 
his fortunes. The truthfulness of the story is confirmed 
in a nimiber of the " Monthly Review " for the same 
year. 

Mr. Burke commends the excellent and most useful 
works of his " friend Arthur Young," (of whom I shall 
have somewhat to say another time,) but regrets that he 
should intimate the largeness of a farmer's profits. He 
discusses the drill-culture, (for wheat,) which, he says, 
is well, provided " the soil is not excessively heavy, or 
encumbered with large, loose stones,* and provided the 
most vigilant superintendence, the most prompt activity, 
which has no such day as to-morrow in its calendar, com- 
bine to speed the plough ; in this case I admit," he says, 
" its superiority over the old and general methods." 
And again he says, — " It requires ten times more of 
labor, of vigilance, of attention, of skill, and, let me 
add, of good fortune also, to carry on the business of a 
farmer with success, than what belongs to any other 
trade." 

May not a farmer take a little pride in such testi- 
mony as this ? 

One of his biographers tells us, that, in his later 
years, the neighbors saw him on one occasion, at his home 

* At that day, horse-hoeing, at regular intervals, was understood to 
form part of what was counted drill-culture. 

1? 



_ 242 WET DAYS. 

of Beaconsfiekl, leaning upon the shoulder of a favorite 
old horse, (which had the privilege of the lav/n,) and 
sobbing. Whereupon the gossiping villagers reported 
the great man crazed. Ay, crazed, — broken by the 
memory of his only and lost son Richard, with whom 
this aged saddle-horse had been a special favorite, — 
crazed, no doubt, at thought of the strong young hand 
whose touch the old beast waited for in vain, — crazed 
and broken, — an oak, ruined and blasted by storms. 
The great mind in this man was married to a great 
heart. 

Croldsmith. 

|0 I not name a fitting companion for a wet day 
in the country, when I name Oliver Goldsmith ? 
Yet he can tell me nothing about farming, or about. 
crops. He knew nothing of them and cared nothing 
for them. He would have made the worst farmer in 
the world. A farmer should be prudent and fore- 
sighted, whereas poor Goldsmith was always as improv- 
ident as a boy. A farmer should be industrious and 
methodical : Goldsmith had no conception of either 
industry or method. A fanner should be willing to be 
taught every day of his life, and Goldsmith was willing 
to be taught nothing. 

He had no more knowledge of gardening and of its 
proper appliances, than he had of economy. I have 



GOLDSMITH. 243 

no doubt that the grafting of a cherry-tree would have 
been as abstruse a problem for him as the balancing 
of his account-book. Nay, if we may believe his own 
story, he had very little eye for the picturesque. He 
was delighted with the flat land and canals of Holland, 
and reckoned them far prettier than the hills and rocks 
of Scotland. Writing to an early friend of the coun- 
try about Leyden, he says, "Nothing can equal its 
beauty. Wherever I turn my eyes, fine houses, ele- 
gant gardens, statues, grottos, vistas, present them- 
selves ; but when you enter their towns, you are 
charmed beyond description. .... In Scotland hills 
and rocks intercept every prospect ; here, 't is all a 
continued plain. The Scotch may be compared to 
a tulip planted in dung ; but I never see a Dutch- 
man in his own house, but I think of a magnifi- 
cent Egyptian temple dedicated to an ox." I have 
no doubt that this indiflference to the picturesque as- 
pects of Nature was as honest as his debts. And yet, 
for all this, and though circled about by rural scenes, 
I do still keep his " Essays " or his " Vicar " in my 
hand, or in my thought most lovingly. He carried 
with him out of Kilkenny West the heart of an Irish 
country-lad, and the odor of the meadows of West- 
meath never wholly left his thought. 

The world is accustomed to regard his little novel, 
which Dr. Johnson bargained away for sixty giiineas, 



244 WET DAYS. 

as a rural tale : it is so quiet ; it is so simple ; its at- 
mosphere is altogether so redolent of the country. 
And yet all, save some few critical readers, will be 
surprised to learn that there is not a picture of natural 
scenery in the book of any length ; and wherever an 
allusion of the kind appears, it does not bear the im- 
press of a mind familiar with the country, and prac- 
tically at home there. The Doctor used to go out 
upon the Edgeware road, — not for his love of trees, 
but to escape noise and duns. Yet we overlook liter- 
alness, charmed as we are by the development of his 
characters and by the sweet burden of his story. The 
statement may seem extraordinary, but I could tran- 
scribe every rural, out-of-door scene in the " Vicar of 
Wakefield " upon a single half-page of foolscap. Of 
the first home of the Vicar we have only this acco.unt : 
— " We had an elegant house, situated in a fine coim- 
try and a good neighborhood." Of his second home 
there is this more full description : — " Our little habi- 
tation was situated at the foot of a sloping hill, sheltered 
with a beautiful underwood behind, and a j^rattling river 
before : on one side a meadow, on the other a green. 
My farm consisted of about twenty acres of excellent 
land, having given a hundred pounds for my predeces- 
sor's good-will. Nothing could exceed the neatness of 
my little enclosures : the elms and hedge-rows appear- 
ing with inexpressible beauty. My house consisted of 



GOLDSMITH. 246 

but one story, and was covered with thatch, which gave 
it an air of great snugness." It is quite certain that an 
author familiar with the country, and with a memory 
stocked with a multitude of kindred scenes, would have 
given a more determinate outline to this picture. But 
whether he would have given to his definite outline the 
fascination that belongs to the vagueness of Goldsmith, 
is wholly another question. 

Again, in the sixth chapter, Mr. Burchell is called 
upon to assist the Vicar and his family in " saving an 
afler-growth of hay." " Our labors," he says, " went on 
lightly ; we turned the swath to the wind." It is plain 
that Goldsmith never saved much hay ; turning the 
swath to the wind may be a good way of making it, 
but it is a slow way of gathering it. In the eighth chap- 
ter of this charming story, the Doctor says, — " Our 
family dined in the field, and we sat, or rather reclined, 
round a temperate repast, oiir cloth spread upon the hay. 
To heighten our satisfaction, the blackbirds answered 
each other from opposite hedges, the familiar redbreast 
came and pecked the crumbs from our hands, and every 
sound seemed but the echo of tranquillity." This is 
very fascinating ; but it is the veriest romanticism of 
country-life. Such sensible girls as Olivia and Sophia 
would, I am quite sure, never have spread the dinner- 
cloth upon hay, which would most certainly have set all 
the gravy aflow, if the platters had not been fairly over- 



246 WET DAYS. 

turned ; and as for the redbreasts, (with that rollicking 
boy Moses in my mind,) I think they must have been 
terribly tame birds. 

But this is only a farmer's criticism, — a Crispin feel- 
ing the bunions on some Phidian statue. And do I 
think the less of Goldsmith, because he wantoned with 
the .literalism of the country, and laid on his prismatic 
colors of romance where only white light lay ? Not one 
whit. It only shows how Genius may discard utter 
faithfulness to detail, if only its song is charged with 
a general simplicity and truthfulness that fill our ears 
and our hearts. 

As for Goldsmith's verse, who does not love it? 
Who does not find tender reminders of the country 
in it? 

" Sweet was the sound, when oft, at evening's close, 
Up yonder hill the village murmur rose: 
There, as I passed with careless steps and slow, 
The mingled notes came softened from below ; 
The swain responsive as the milkmaid sung, 
The sober herd that lowed to meet their young ; 
The noisy geese that gabbled o'er the pool, 
The playful children just let loose from school; 
The watch-dog's voice that bayed the whispering wind. 
And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind; — 
These all in sweet confiision sought the shade. 
And filled each pause the nightingale had made." 

And yet the nightingale is a myth to us ; the milkmaid's 
song comes all the way from a century back in Ireland : 



GOLDSMITH. 247 

neither one nor the other charms our ear, listen faith- 
fully as we may ; but there is a subtile rural aroma per- 
vading the lines I have quoted, which calls at every 
couplet a responsive memory, — which girls welcome as 
they welcome fresh flowers, — which boys welcome as 
they welcome childish romp, — which charms middle 
age away from its fierce wrestle with anxieties, and laps 
it in some sweet Elysium of the past. Not all the arts 
of all the modernists, — not " Maud," with its garden- 
song, — not the caged birds of Killingworth, singing up 
and down the village-street, — not the heather-bells out 
of which the springy step of Jean Ingelow crushes 
perfume, — shall make me forget the old, sweet, even 
flow of the " Deserted Village." 

Down with it, my boy ! — (from the third shelf). 
G-o-L-D-s-M-i-T-H — a worker in gold — is on the back. 

And I sit reading it to myself, as a fog comes welter- 
ing in from the sea, covering all the landscape, save 
some half-dozen of the city-spires, which peer above 
the drift like beacons. 



EiaHTH DAY. 



Arthur Young. 

XN these notes upon the Farm- Writers and the Pas- 
-■- torals, I have endeavored to keep a certain chrono- 
logic order ; and upon this wet morning I find myself 
embayed among those old gentlemen who lived in the 
latter part of the eighteenth century. George III. is 
tottering under his load of royalty ; the French Revo- 
lution is all asmoke. Fox and Sheridan and Burke 
and the younger Pitt are launching speeches at this 
Gallic tempest of blood, — each in his own way. Our 
American struggle for liberty has been fought bravely 
out ; and the master of it has retired to his estates 
upon the Potomac. There, in his house at Mount Ver- 
non, he receives one day a copy of the early volumes 
of Young's "Annals of Agriculture," with the author's 
compliments, and the proffer of his services to execute 
orders for seeds, implements, cattle, or " anything else 
that might contribute to the General's rural amuse- 
ments." 



ARTHUR YOUNG. 249 

The General, in his good old-fashioned way, returns 
the compliments with interest, and says, " I will give 
you the trouble. Sir, of providing and sending to the 
care of Wakelin Welch, of London, merchant, the fol- 
lowing articles : — 

" Two of the simplest and best-constructed ploughs 
for land which is neither very heavy nor sandy ; to be 
drawn by two horses; to have spare shares and 
coulters ; and a mould, on which to form new irons, 
when the old ones are worn out, or will require repair- 
ing. I will take the liberty to observe, that, some years 
ago, from a description or a recommendation thereof 
wliich I had somewhere met with, I sent to England 
for what was then called the Rotherham or patent 
plough ; and, till it began to wear and was ruined by a 
bungling country-smith, that no plough could have done 
better work, or appeared to have gone easier with two 
horses ; but, for want of a mould, which I neglected 
to order with the plough, it became useless after the 
irons which came Avith it were much worn. 

" A little of the best kind of cabbage seed for field- 
culture. 

" Twenty pounds of the best turnip seed. 

" Ten bushels of sainfoin seed. 

" Eight bushels of the winter veches. 

" Two bushels of rye-grass seed. 

" Fifty pounds of hop-clover seed." 



250 ' WET DAYS. 

The curious reader may be interested to know that 
this shipment of goods, somewhat injured by stowage 
in the hold of the vessel, reached Mount Vernon just 
one week after Washington had left it to preside over 
the sittings of the Constitutional Convention. And 
amidst all the eagerness of those debates under which 
the ark of our nationality was being hammered into 
shape, this great man of system did not omit to send to 
his farm-manager the most minute directions in respect 
to the disposition of the newly arrived seeds. 

Of those directions, and of the farm-method at the 
home of Washington, I may possibly have something to 
say at another time : I have named the circumstance 
only to show that Arthur Young had a world-wide rep- 
utation as an agriculturist at this day, (1786-7,) al- 
though he lived for more than thirty years beyond it. 

Arthur Young was born at a little village near to 
Bury St. Edmund's, (evermore famous as the scene of 
Pickwickian adventure,) in the year 1741. He had his 
schooling like other boys, and was for a time in a 
counting-room at Lynn, where he plunged into litera- 
ture at the unfledged age of seventeen, by writing a 
tract on the American-French war ; and this he followed 
up with several novels, among which was one entitled 
'• The Fair American." * I greatly fear that the book 

* By an odd coincidence, I observe that Washington made one of 
his first shipments of tobacco (after his marriage with Mrs. Custis) 



ARTHUR YOUNG. 251 

was not even with the title : it has certainly slipped 
away from the knowledge of all the bibliographers. 

At twenty-two he undertook the management of the 
form upon which his mother was living, and of which the 
lease was about expiring : here, by his own account, he 
spent a great deal more than he ever reaped. A little 
later, having come to the dignity of a married man, he 
leased a farm in Essex, (Samford Hall,) consisting of 
some three hundred acres. This, however, he aban- 
doned in despair very shortly, — giving a brother-former 
a hundred pounds to take it off his hands. Thereupon 
he advertises for another venture, gallops through all 
the South of England to examine those offered to his 
notice, and ends with renting a hundred-acre farm in 
Hertfordshire, which proved of "a hungry vitriolic 
gravel," where, he says, "for nine years, I occupied 
the jaws of a wolf" 

Meantime, however, his pen has not been idle ; for, 
previous to 1773, he had written and published no less 
than sixteen octavo volmnes relating mostly to agricul- 
tural subjects, besides two ponderous quartos filled with 
tabular details of " Experiments on the Cultivation of 
all Sorts of Grain and Pulse, both in the Old and New 
Methods." 

This last was the most pretentious of his books, the 

upon a vessel called " The Fair American." Did the ship possibly 
give a name to the novel, or the novel a name to the ship? 



252 WET DAYS. 

result of most painstaking labor, and by far the most 
useless and uninteresting ; it passed long ago into the 
waste-paper shops of London. A very full synopsis of 
it, however, may be found in four or five consecutive 
numbers of the old " Monthly Review" for 1771. 

The great fault of the book is, (and it is the fault of 
a good many books,) it does not prove what the author 
wants to prove. He had hoped by a long - continued 
course of minute experiments (and those detailed in his 
book count a thousand, and extend over a period of 
five years) to lay down an exact law of procedure for 
the guidance of his brother-farmers. But the brother- 
famiers did not weaiy themselves over his tables ; or if 
they did, they found themselves as much miiddled as the 
experimenter himself. A good rule for dry weather 
was a bad one for wet ; and what might be advisable 
for Suffolk would be wrong in Herts. Upon one occa- 
sion, where he shows a loss of nearly three pounds to 
the acre on drilled wheat, against a loss of two shillings 
fourpence on broadcast-sowing, he observes, — " Rea- 
son is so often mistaken in matters of husbandry, that 
it is never fully to be trusted, even in deducing conse- 
quences evident from experiment itself." By which we 
may safely conclude that the experiment disappointed 
his expectations. ' It must be remembered, however, 
that Mr. Young was quite youthful and inexperienced 
at the time of conducting these trials, and that he pos- 



ARTHUR YOUNG. 253 

sessed none of that scientific accuracy which character- 
izes the analysis of farm-experiments at Rothamstead or 
at Bechelbron. He says, witli a diverting sincerity, 
that he was never " absent more than a single week at 
a time from the field of his observations without leaving 
affairs in charge of a trusty bailiff." He was too full of 
a constitutional unrest, and too much wedded to a habit 
of wide and rapid generalization, to acquit himself well 
in the task of laborious and minute observation. 

His " Tours " through the English counties, and his 
" Letters to Farmers," were of great service, and were 
widely read. His " Farmer's Calendar " became a 
standard work. He entertained at one time the project 
of emigrating to America; but, abandoning this, he 
enlisted as Parliamentary reporter for the " Morning 
Post," — walking seventeen miles to his country-home 
every Saturday evening, and returning afoot everj- 
Monday morning. His energy and industry were im- 
mense ; his information upon all subjects connected with 
agriculture, whether British or Continental, entirely 
unmatched. The Empress of Russia sent three lads to 
him to be taught the arts of husbandry, — at which, I 
venture, his plodding neighbors who " made the ends 
meet " laughed incontinently. He had also pupils from 
France, America, Italy, Poland, Sicily, and Portugal. 

In 1784 he commenced the publication of his famous 
" Annals of Agriculture," which grew to the enormous 



254 WET DAYS. 

mass of forty-five volumes, and in the course of which 
dukes and princes and kings and republican generals 
were his correspondents. At the formation of the 
Board of Agriculture, he was named Secretary, with a 
salary and duties that kept him mostly in London' 
where he died at an advanced age in 1820. 

It is a somewhat remarkable fact, that a man so dis- 
tinguished in agriculture, so full of information, so ear- 
nest in advocacy of improved methods of culture, so 
doggedly industrious, should yet never have undertaken 
farming on his own account save at a loss. I attribute 
this very much to his zeal for experiments. If he could 
establish, or controvert, some popular theory by the loss 
of his crop, he counted it no loss, but a gain to hus- 
bandry. Such men are benefactors; such men need 
salaries ; and if any such are afloat with us, unprovided 
for, I beg to recommend them for clerkships in the 
Agricultural Bureau at "Washington ; and if the Com- 
missioner shall hit upon one Arthur Young among the 
score of his proteges, the country will be better repaid 
than it usually is. 

Ellis and Bakewell. 

npHE " Practical Farmer," and other books of Wil- 

-^ liam Ellis, Hertfordshire, were in considerable 

vogue in the days of Young, and received a little faint 



ELLIS AND BAKE WELL. . 255 

praise from him, while he says that through half his 
works he is " a mere old woman." 

I notice that Ellis recommends strongly the plough- 
ing-in of buckwheat,* — a practice which Washington 
followed extensively at Mount Vernon. He tells us 
that a cow is reckoned in his day to pay a clear profit 
of four pounds a year (for butter and cheese) ; but he 
adds, " Certain it is that no one knows what a cow will 
pay, unless she has her constant bellyful of requisite 
meat." And his talk about cider has such a relishy 
smack of a " mere old woman " that I venture to quote 
it. 

" I have drank," he says, " such Pippin Cyder, as I 
never met with anywhere, but at Ivinghoe, just under 
our Chiltern Hills, where their Soil is partly a chalky 
Loam : It was made by its Owner, a Farmer, and on 
my Recommendation our Minister went with me to 
prove it, and gave it his Approbation. This was made 
from the Holland Pippin : And of such a wholesome 
Nature is the Pippin of any Sort above all others, that 
I remember there is a Relation of its wonderful influ- 
ences, I think it was in Germany : A Mother and tAvo 
or three of her Sons having a Trial at Law, were asked 
what they eat and drank to obtain such an Age, which 
was four or five hundred years that they all made up 
amongst them ; they answered, chiefly by eating the 

* Practical Farmer, by AVilliam Ellis. London, 1759. 



256 WET DAYS. 

Apple, and drinking its Juice. And I knew an emi- 
nent, rich Lawyer, almost eighty Years old, who was 
very much debilitated through a tedious Sickness, on 
the telling him this Story, got Pippins directly, sliced 
them to the number of a dozen at a Time, and infused 
them in Spring- Water, and made it his common Drink, 
till Cyder - Time came on ; also he fell on planting a 
number of Pippin-Trees in order to his enjoying their 
salubrious Quality, and a fine Plantation there is at this 
Day in his Gardens a few miles from me. This Practice 
of his drinking the Pippin Liquor and Cyder, answered 
extraordinary well, for he lived several Years after, in a 
pretty good State of Health." 

The next name I come upon, in this rainy-day ser- 
vice, starts a pleasant picture to my mind, — not offset 
by a British landscape, but by one of our own New- 
England hills. A group of heavy, overgrown chestnuts 
stand stragglingly upon a steep ascent of pasture ; they 
are flanked by a wide reach of velvety turf covering 
the same swift slope of hill ; gray boulders of granite, 
scattered here and there, show gleaming spangles of 
mica ; clumps of pokeweed lift sturdily a massive luxu- 
riance of stems and a great growth of purple beri'ies ; 
occasional stumps are cushioned over with mosses, 
green and gray ; and, winding among stumps and rocks, 
there comes trending down the green hill-side a comely 
flock of great, long-woolled sheep : they nibble at stray 



ELLIS AND BAKE WELL. 257 

clover-blossoms ; they lift their heads and look, — it is 
only the old dog who is by me, — they know him ; they 
straggle on. I strew the salt here and there upon a 
stone ; " Dandie " pretends to sleep ; and presently the 
woolly company is all around me, — the " Bakewell " 
flock. 

Robert Bakewell,* who gave the name to this race 
of sheep, (afterward known as New-Leicesters,) lived at 
Dishley, upon the highway from Leicester to Derby, 
and not very far from that Ashby de la Zouche where 
Scott plants the immortal scene of the tournament in 
" Ivanhoe." He was a farmer's son, with limited edu- 
cation, and with limited means ; yet, by due attention 
to crosses, he succeeded in establishing a flock which 
gained a world-wide reputation. His first letting of 
bucks at some fifteen shillings the season was suc- 
ceeded in the year 1774 by lettings at a hundred guineas 
a head ; and there were single animals in his flock from 
which he is reported to have received, in the height of 
his fame, the sum of twelve hundred pounds. 

Nor was Bakewell less known for his stock of neat 
cattle, for his judicious crosses, and for a gentleness of 
management by which he secured the utmost docility. 
A writer in the " Gentleman's Magazine " of his date 

* The geologist, Robert Bakewell, who lived many years later, 
wrote of the "Influence of the Soil on WooV and for that reason, 
perhaps, is frequently confounded by agricultural writers with the 
gr^at breeder. 

17 



258 WET DAYS. 

says, — " This docility seemed to run through the herd. 
At an age when most of his brethren are either foam- 
ing or bellowing with rage and madness, old ' Comely ' 
had all the gentleness of a Iamb, both in his look and 
action. lie would lick the hand of his feeder ; and if 
any one patted or scratched him, he would bow himself 
down almost on his knees." 

The same Avriter, describing Mr. Bakewell's kitchen, 
(which served as hall,) says, — " The separate joints 
and points of each of the more celebrated of his cattle 
were preserved in pickle, or hung up there side by side, 
— showing the thickness of the flesh and external fat 
on each, and the smallness of the offal. There were also 
skeletons of the different breeds, that they might be 
compared with each other, and the comparative differ- 
ence marked." 

Arthur Young, in his " Eastern Tour," says, " All his 
bulls stand still in the field to be examined ; the way 
of driving them from one field to another, or home, is 
by a little switch ; he or his men walk by their side, and 
guide them with the stick wherever they please ; and 
they are accustomed to this method from being calves." 

He was a tall, stout, broad-shouldered man of a 
swarthy complexion, clad usually in a brown loose coat, 
with scarlet waistcoat, leather breeches, and top-boots. 
In this dress, and in the kitchen I have above described, 
he entertained Russian princes, French and German 



WILLIAM COWPER. 259 

royal dukes, British peers and farmers, and sight-seers 
of every degree. All his guests, whether high or low, 
v.ere obliged to conform to the farmer's rules : " Break- 
fast at eight o'clock, dinner at one, supper at nine, bed 
at eleven o'clock " ; at half-past ten — let who would be 
there — he knocked out his last pipe. 

lie left no book for future farmers to maltreat, — 
not even so much as a pamphlet ; and the sheep that 
bore his name are now refined by other crosses, or are 
supplanted by the long-woolled troop of '* New-Oxford- 
shire." 

William Coivper. 

(~\^ the way from Leicestershire to London, one 
^^ passed, in the old coach-days, through Northamp- 
ton ; and from Northampton it is one of the most charm- 
ing of drives for an agriculturist over to the town of 
Newport-Pagnell. I lodged there, at the Swan tavern, 
upon a July night some twenty years gone ; and next 
morning I rambled over between -the hedge-rows and 
across meadows to the little village of "Weston, where 
I lunched at the inn of " Cowper's Oak." The house 
where the poet had lived with good Mrs. Unwin was 
only next door, and its front was quite covered over 
with a clambering rose-tree. The pretty waitress of 
the inn showed me the way, and a wheezing old man — 
half gardener and half butler — introduced me to the 



260 WET DAYS. 

rooms where Cowper had passed so many a dreary hour, 
and where he had been cheered by the blithe company 
of Cousin Lady Hesketh. 

My usher remembered the crazy recluse, and, when 
we had descended to the garden, told me how much he, 
with other village - boys, stood in awe of him, — and 
how the poet used to walk up and down the garden- 
alleys in dressing-gown and white-tasselled cotton cap, 
muttering to himself; but what mutterings some of 
them were ! 

" Thy silver locks, once auburn bright, 
Are still more lovely in my sight 
Than golden beams of orient light, 
My Mary ! 

" For could I view nor them nor thee, 
What sight worth seeing could I see ? 
The sun would rise in vain for me, 

My Mary ! 

" Partakers of thy sad decline. 
Thy hands their little force resign, 
Yet, gently pressed, press gently mine, 
My Mary!" 

Afterward the shuffling old usher turns a key in 
a green gate, and shows me into the " Wilderness." 
Here I come presently upon the Temple, — sadly shat- 
tered, — and upon the urns with their mouldy inscrip- 
tions ; I wander through the stately avenue of lindens 



WILLIAM COWPER. 261 

to the Alcove, and, so true are the poet's descriptions, 
I recognize at once the seat of the Throclonortons, the 
" Peasant's Nest," the " Rustic Bridge," and far away 
a glimpse of the spire of Olney. 

Plainly as I see to-day the farm-flat of Edgewood 
smoking under the spring rains below me, I see again . 
the fat meadows that lie along the sluggish Ouse reek- 
ing with the heats of July. And I bethink me of the 
bewildered, sensitive poet, shrinking from the world, 
loving Nature so dearly, loving friends like a child, lov- 
ing God with reverence, and yet with a great fear that 
is quickened by the harsh hammering of John Newton's 
iron Calvinism into a wild turbulence of terror. From 
this he seeks escape in the walks of the " Wilderness," 
and paces moodily up and down from temple to alcove, 
— in every shady recess still haunted by " a fearful 
looking-for of judgment," and from every sunny bit of 
turf clutching fancies by eager handful, to strew over 
his sweet poem of the " Task." 

A sweet poem, I repeat, though not a finished or a 
grand one ; but there is in it such zealous, earnest over- 
flow of country-love that we farmers must needs wel- 
come it with open hearts. 

I should not like such a man as Cowper for a tenant, 
where any bargains were to be made, or any lambs to 
be killed ; nor do I think that the mere memory of his 
verse would have put me upon that July walk from 



262 WET DAYS. 

Newport to Weston ; but his letters and his sad life, 
throughout which trees and flowers were made almost 
his only confidants, led me to the scene where that 
strange marriage with Nature was solemnized. And 
though the day was balmy, and the sun fairly golden, 
the garden and the alley and the trees and the wilder- 
ness were like a widow in her weeds. 



Gilbert White. 

pilLBERT WHITE, of Selborne, belongs to this 
^-^ epoch ; and no lover of the country or of coxmtry- 
things can pass him by without cordial recognition and 
genial praise. There is not so much of incident or of 
adventure in his little book as would suffice to pepper 
the romances of one issue of a weekly paper in our day. 
The literary mechanicians would find in him no artful 
contrivance of parts and no rhetorical jangle of lan- 
guage. It is only good Parson White, who, wandering 
about the fields and the brook-sides of Selborne, scruti- 
nizes with rare clearness and patience a thousand mir- 
acles of God's providence, in trees, in flowers, in stones, 
in birds, — and jots down the story of his scrutiny with 
such simplicity, such reverent trust in His power and 
goodness, such loving fondness for almost every created 
thing, that the reading of it charms like Walton's story 
of the fishes. 



GILBERT WHITE. 263 

We Americans, indeed, do not altogether recognize 
his chaffinches and his ^tlarks ; his daws and his fern- 
owl are strange to us ; and his robin-redbreast, though 
undoubtedly the same Avhich in our nursery-days flitted 
around the dead " Children in the Wood," (while tears 
stood in our eyes,) and 

"painfully ' 
Did cover them with leaves," 

is by no means our American redbreast. For one, I 
wish it were otherwise ; I wish with all my heart that I 
could identify the old, pitying, feathered mourners in 
the British wood with the joyous, rollicking singer who 
perches every sunrise, through all the spring, upon the 
thatch of the bee - house, within stone's - throw of my 
window, and stirs the dewy air with his loud bravura. 

Notwithstanding, however, the dissimilarity of species, 
the studies of this old naturalist are directed with a nice 
particularity, and are colored with an unaffected home- 
liness, which are very charming ; and I never hear the 
first whisk of a swallow's wing in summer but I feel 
an inclination to take down the booklet of the good old 
Parson, drop into my library-chair, and follow up at my 
leisure all the gyrations and flutterings and incuba- 
tions of all the Mrundines of Selborne. Every country- 
liver should own the book, and be taught from it — 
nicety of observation. 



264 WET DAYS 

Truster and Farm-Profits. 

THERE was another clergyman of a different stamp, 
— the Reverend John Trusler of Cobham, Surrey, 
— who wrote about this time a book on chronology, a 
few romances, a book on law, and another upon farming. 
He commenced public life as an apothecary ; from his 
drug-shop he went to the pulpit, thence to book-selling, 
and finally to book-making. I am inclined to think that 
he found the first of these two trades the more profita- 
ble one : it generally is. 

Mr. Trusler introduces his agricultural work by de- 
claring that it " contains all the knowledge necessary 
in the plain business of farming, unincumbered with 
theory, speculation, or experimental inquiry " ; — by 
which it v/ill be seen that the modesty of the author 
was largely overborne by the enterprise of the book- 
seller. The sole value of his treatise lies in certain statis- 
tical details with regard to the cost and profits of differ- 
ent crops, prices of food, rates of wages, etc. By his 
showing, the profit of an acre of wheat in 1780 was £2 
10s. ; of barley, £3 3s. %d. ; of buckwheat, £2 19s. ; and a 
farm of one hundred and fifty acres, judiciously man- 
aged, would leave a profit of £379. 

These estimates of farm-profits, however, atiall times, 
are very deceptive. A man can write up his own bal- 
ance - sheet, but he cannot make up his neighbor's. 



TRUSLER AXD FARM-PROFITS. 265 

There will be too many screws — or pigs — loose, which 
he cannot take into the reckoning. The agricultural 
journals give us from time to time the most alluring 
" cash-accounts " of farm-revenue, which make me re- 
gard, for a month or two thereafter, every sober-sided 
farmer I meet as a Rasselas, — " choring " and " team- 
ing it " in a Happy Valley ; but shortly I come upon 
some retired citizen, turned farmer, and active member 
of a Horticultural Society, slipping about the doors of 
some " Produce and Commission Store " for his winter's 
stock of vegetables, butter, and fruits, — and the fact 
impresses me doubtfully and painfully. It is not often, 
unfortunately, that printed farm-accounts — most of all, 
modei-farm-accounts — will bear close scrutiny. Some- 
times there is delicate reservation of any charge for 
personal labor or superintendence ; sometimes an equally 
cheerful reticence in respect to any interest upon capi- 
tal ; and in nearly all of them such miniature expression 
of the cost of labor as gives a very shaky consistency 
to the exhibit 

Farmers, I am aware, are not much given to figures ; 
but outside " averagers " are ; and agricultural writers, 
if they indulge in figures, ought to show some decent 
respect for the proprieties of arithmetic. I have before 
me now the " Bi-Monthly Report of the United States 
Agricultural Department for January and February, 
J 864," in the course of v\'hich it is gravely asserted, 



266 WET DAYS. 

that, in the event of a certain suggested tax on tobacco, 
" the tobacco-grower would find at the end of the year 
two hundred and ten per cent, of his crops unsold." 
Now I am not familiar with the tobacco-crop, and still 
less familiar with the Washington schemes of taxation ; 
but whatever may be the exigencies of the former, and 
whatever may be the enormities of the latter, I find 
myself utterly imable to measure, even proximately, the 
misfortune of a tobacco-grower who should find himself 
stranded with two hundred and ten per cent, of his crop, 
after his sales were closed ! It is plainly a case involv- 
ing a pretty large quid pro quo, if it be not a clear one 
of nisi quid. 

Sinclair and Others. 

SIR JOHN SINCLAIR, so honorably known in 
connection with British agriculture, dealt with an 
estate in Scotland of a hundred thousand acres. He 
parcelled this out in manageable farms, advanced 
money to needy tenants, and by his liberality and en- 
terprise gave enormous increase to his rental. He also 
organized the first valid system for obtaining agricul- 
tural statistics through the clergymen of the different 
parishes in Scotland, thus bringing together a vast 
amount of valuable information, which was given to 
the public at intervals between 1790 and 1798. And 



SINCLAIR AND OTHERS. 207 

I notice witli interest that the poet Burns was a con- 
tributor to one of these voknnes,* over the signature 
of " A Peasant," in which he gives account of a fann- 
ers' library established in his neighborhood, and adds, 
in closing, — "A peasant who can read and enjoy such 
books is certainly a much superior being to his neigh- 
bor, who, perhaps, stalks beside his team, very little re- 
moved, except in shape, from the brutes he drives." 

There is reason to believe that Sir John Sinclair, at 
one time, — in the heat of the French Revolution, — 
projected emigration to America; and I find in one of 
"Washington's letters f to him the following allusion to 
the scheme : — "To have such a tenant as Sir John 
Sinclair (however desirable it might be) is an honor I 
dare not hope for ; and to alienate any part of the fee- 
simple estate of Mount Vernon is a measure I am not 
inclined to." 

Another British cultivator of this period, whose name 
is associated with the Mount Vernon estate, was Rich- 
ard Parkinson of Doncaster, who wrote " The Ex- 
perienced Farmer," and who not only proposed at 
one time to manage one of the "Washington farms, but 
did actually sail for America, occupied a place called 
Orange-IIill, near Baltimore, for a year or more, trav- 
elled through the country, making what sale he could 

* Third volume Slalistics, p. 5'J8. 

t Dated Ducember, 1796. Sparks's Life and Letters, Vol. XII. p. 
328. 



268 WET DAYS. 

of his " Experienced Farmer," and, on his return to 
England, published " A Tour in America," which is to 
be met with here and there upon the top-shelves of 
old libraries, and which is not calculated to encourage 
immigration. 

He sets out by saying, — '• Tlie great advantages 
held out by different authors, and men travelling from 
America with commission to sell land, have deluded 
persons of all denominations with an idea of becoming 
land-owners and independent. They have, however, 
been most lamentably disappointed, — particularly the 
farmers, and all those that have purchased land ; for, 
notwithstanding the low price at which the American 
lands are sold, the property of the soil is such as to make 
it not to pay for labor ; therefore the greater part have 
brought themselves and their families to total ruin." 

He is distressed, too, by the independence of the la- 
borers, — being " often forced to rise in the morning 
to milk the cows, when the servants were in bed." 

Among other animals which he took with him, he 
mentions " tv/o race-horses, ten blood mares, a bull and 
cow of the North Devon, a bull and cow of the no- 
horned York, a cow (with two calves and in calf again) 
of the Holderness, .five boar- and seven sow-pigs of four 
different kinds." 

On arriving at Norfolk, Virginia, in November, he 
inquired for hay, and '• v.as informed that American 



SINCLAIR AND OTHERS. 269 

cattle subsisted on blades and slops, and that no hay 
was to be had." He foimd, also, that " American cows 
eat horse-dung as naturally as an English cow eats hay ; 
and as America grows no grass, the street is the cheap- 
est place to keep them in." This would make an ad- 
mirable item for the scientific column of the London 
" Athenaeum." Again he says, with a delightful point- 
edness of manner, — " No transaction in America re- 
flects any discredit on a man, vmless he loses money by 

it I remember an Englishman, after repeating 

all the things that could fill a stranger's mind with 
trouble and horror, said, with a very heavy sigh, as 
he was going out of the house, ' It is the Devil's own 
country, to be sure ! ' " 

The -' Times " newspaper never said a prettier word 
than that ! 

Mr. Robert Brown was a worthier man, and, I sus- 
pect, a better farmer ; he was one of the earlier types 
of those East-Lothian men who made their neighbor- 
hood the garden of Scotland. He was also the author 
of a book on " Rural Affairs," the editor for fifteen 
years of the well-known " Edinburgh Farmers' Mag- 
azine," and (if 1 am not mistaken) communicated the 
very valuable article on " Agriculture " to the old '' En- 
cyciopiydia Britannica." 

At this period, too, I find an Eai-1 of Dundonald 
(Archibald Cochrane) writing upon the relations of 



270 WET DAYS. 

chemistry to agriculture, — and a little later, Richard 
Kirwan, F. R. S., indulging in vagaries upon the same 
broad, and still unsettled, subject. 

Joseph Cradock, a quiet, cultivated gentleman, who 
had been on terms of familiarity with Johnson, Gai*- 
rick, and Goldsmith, published in 1775 his "Village 
Memoirs," in which Lancelot Brown has a little fun 
pointed at him, under the name of " Layout," the gen- 
eral " undertaker " for gardens. Sir Uvedale Price, 
too, a man of somev/hat stronger calibre, and of great 
taste, (fully demonstrated on his own place of Foxley,) 
made poor Brown the target for some well-turned wit- 
ticisms, and, what was far better, demonstrated the near 
relationship which should always exist between the 
aims of the landscape-painter and those of the land- 
scape-gardener. I am inclined to think that Brown 
was a little unfairly ased by these new writers, and that 
he had won a success which provoked a great deal of 
jealousy. A i^opularity too great is always dangerous. 
Sir Uvedale was a man of strong conservative tenden- 
cies, and believed no more in the levelling of men than 
in the levelling of hills. He found his love for the 
picturesque sated in many of those hoary old avenues 
which, under Brown, had been given to the axe. I sus- 
pect he would have forgiven the presence of a clipped 
yew in a landscape where it had thriven for centuiies ; 
the moss of age could give picturesqueness even to 



OLD AGE OF FARMERS. 271 

formality. He speaks somewliere of the kindly work 
of his uncle, who had disposed his walks so as to be a 
convenience to the jDoor people of an adjoining parish, 
and adds, with curious naivete, — " Such attentive kind- 
nesses are amply repaid by affectionate regard and rev- 
erence ; and were they general throughout the king- 
dom, they would do much more towards guarding us 
against democratical opinions than ' twenty thousand 
soldiers amied in proof.'" 

Richard Knight (a brother of the distinguished hor- 
ticulturist) illustrated the picturesque theory of Price 
in a passably clever poem, called " The Landscape," 
which had not, however, enough of outside merit to 
keep it alive. Humphrey Repton, a professional de- 
signer of gardens, whose work is to be found in almost 
every county of England, took issue with Price in 
respect to his picturesque theory, — as became an in- 
dependent gardener who would not recognize allegiance 
to the painters. But the antagonism was only one of 
those petty wars about non-essentials, and significance 
of terms, into which eager book-makers are so apt to 
run. 

Old Age of Farmers. 

IN the course of one of my earlier Wet Days I took 
occasion to allude to the brave old age that was 
reached by the classic veterans, — Xenophon, Cato, 



272 WET DAYS. 

and Varro ; and now I find among the most eminent 
British agriculturists and gardeners of the close of the 
last century a firm grip on life that v/ould have matched 
the hardihood of Cato. Old Abercrombie of Preston 
Pans, as we have already seen, reached the age of 
eighty. Walpole, though I lay no claim to him as 
farmer or gardener, yet, thanks to the walks and gar- 
den-work of Strawberry Hill, lived to the same age. 
Philip Miller was an octogenarian. Lord Karnes was 
aged eighty-seven at his death (1782). Arthur Young, 
though struggling with blindness in his later years, 
had accumulated such stock of vitality by his out-door 
life as to bridge him well over into the present century: 
he died in 1820, aged seventy -nine. Parson Trusler, 
notwithstanding his apothecary-schooling, lived to be 
eighty. In 182G died Joseph Cradock of the ''Vil- 
lage Memoirs," and a devoted horticulturist, aged 
eighty-five. Three years after, (1829,) Sir Uvedale 
Price bade final adieu to his delightful seat of Foxley, 
at the age of eighty-three. Sir John Sinclair lived 
fairly into oiu" own time, (1835,) and v/as eighty-one 
at his death. 

William Speechley, whom Johnson calls the best gar- 
dener of his time, and who established the first efiec- 
tive system of hot-house culture for j^ines in England, 
died in 1819, aged eighty-six ; and in the same year, 
William Marshal, a voluminous agricultural writer and 



OLD AGE OF FARMERS. 273 

active farmer, died at the age of eighty. And I must 
mention one more, Dr. Andi-ew Duncan, a Scotch phy- 
sician, who cultivated his garden with his own hands, 
— inscribuig over the entrance-gate, " Hinc sahis, — 
iind who was the founder of the Horticultural Society 
of Edinburgh. This hale old doctor died in 1828, at 
the extreme age of eighty-four ; and to the very last 
year of his life he never omitted going up to the top 
of Artliur's Seat every May-Day morning, to bathe 
his forehead in the summer's dew. 

As a country-liver, I like to contemplate and to boast 
of the hoary age of these veterans. The inscription 
of good old Dr. Duncan was not exaggerated. Every 
man who digs his own garden, and keeps the weeds 
dov/n thoroughly, may truthfully place the same writing 
over the gate, — " Hinc solus " (wherever he may place 
his '"'■ Hinc pecunia"). Nor is the coniiDarative safety 
of active gardening or farming pursuits due entirely 
to the vigorous bodily exercise involved, but quite as 
umch, it seems to me, to that enlivening and freshening 
influence which must belong to an intinjate and loving 
and intelligent companionship with Nature. It may be 
an animal view of the matter, — but, in estunating the 
comparative advantages and disadvantages of a coun- 
try-life, I think we take too little account of that glow 
and exhilaration of the blood which come of every- 
day dealings with the ground and flowers and trees, 
IS 



274 WET DAYS. 

and which, as age approaches, subside into a calm 
equanimity that looks Death in the face no more fear- 
ingly tlian if it were a frost. I have gray-haired neigh- 
bors around me who have come to a hardy old age upon 
their little farms, — buffeting all storms, — petting the 
cattle which have come down to them from ten gen- 
erations of short-lived kine, gone by, — trailing ancient 
vines, that have seen a quarter of a century of life, 
over their door-steps, — tiu'ning over soil, every cheery 
season of May, from which they have already gathered 
fifty harvests ; and I cannot but regard their serene 
philosophy, and their quiet, thankful, and Christian en- 
joyment of the bounties of Nature, as something quite 
as much to be envied as the distinctions of town-craft. 
I ask myself, — If these old gentlemen had plunged 
into the whirlpool of a city five-and-fifty years ago, 
would they have been still adrift upon this tide of time, 
where we are all serving our apprenticeships ? — and 
if so, would they have worn the same calm and cheer- 
ful equanimity amid the harvests of traffic or the blight 
of a panic ? — and if not adrift, would they have car- 
ried a clearer and more justifying record to the hearing 
of the Great Court than they will carry hence when 
our village-bell doles out the funeral march for them ? 

The rain is beating on my windows ; the rain is 
beating on the plain ; a mist is driving in from the 
Sound, over which I see only the spires, — those Chris- 



OLD AGE OF FARMERS. 275 

tian beacons. And (by these hints, that always fret the 
horizon) calling to mind that bit of the best of all pray- 
ers, " Lead us not into temptation,'' it seems to me that 
man}' a comitry-Iiver might transmute it without ofience, 
and in all faith, into words like these, — " Lead us not 
into cities." To think for a moment of poor farmer 
Burns, widi the suppers of Edinburgh, and the orgies 
of the gentlemen of the Caledonian hunt, inflaming his 
imagination there in the wretched chamber of his low 
farm-house of Ellisland ! 

But all this, dovrn my last two pages, relates to the 
physical and the moral aspects of the matter, — aspects 
which are, surely, richly Avorthy of consideration. The 
question whether country-life and country-pursuits will 
bring the intellectual faculties to their strongest bent 
is quite a distinct one. There may be opportunity for 
culture ; but opportunity counts for nothing, except it 
occur under conditions that prompt to its employment. 
The incitement to the largest efforts of which the mind 
is capable comes ordinarily from mental attrition, — an 
attrition for which the retirement demanded by rural 
pursuits gives little occasion. Milton would never have 
come to his stature among pear-trees, — nor Newton, nor 
Bui'ke. They may have made first-rate farmers or hor- 
ticulturists ; they may have surpassed all about them ; 
but their level of action would have been a far lower 
one than that w^hich they actually occupied. There is a 



276 WET DAYS. 

great deal of balderdash written and talked upon this 
subject, which ought to have an end ; it does not help 
farming, it does not help the world, — simply because 
it is untrue. Rural life offers charming objects of 
study ; but to most minds it does not oifer the prompt- 
ings for large intellectual exertion. It ripens health- 
fully all the receptive faculties ; it disposes to that judi- 
cial calmness of mind which is essential to clearness 
and directness of vision ; but it does not kindle the 
heat of large and ambitious endeavor. Hence we often 
find that a man who has passed the first half of his life 
in comparative isolation, cultivating his resoui'ces qui- 
etly, unmoved by the disturbances and the broils of 
civic life, will, on transfer to public scenes, and stirred 
by that emulation which comes of contact with the 
world, feel all his faculties lighted with a new glow, 
and accomplish results which are as much a wonder to 
himself as to others. 



Burns and Bloomfield. 

T" HAVE alluded to the poet-farmer Burns, — a cap. 
-*- ital ploughman, a poor manager, an intemperate 
lover, a sad reveller, a stilted letter-writer, a rare good- 
fellow, and a poet whose poems will live forever. It is 
no wonder he did not succeed as farmer; Moss-giel had 
an ugly, wet subsoil, and draining-tiles were as yet not 



BURNS AND BLOOMFIELD. 277 

in vogue ; but from all the accounts I can gather, there 
was never a truer furrow laid than was laid by Robert 
Burns in his days of vigor, upon that same damp upland 
of Moss-giel ; his " fearings " were all true, and his head- 
lands as clear of draggled sod as if he had used the best 
'" Ruggles, Nourse, and Mason " of our time- Alas for 
the daisies ! he must have turned over perches of them 
in his day ; and yet only one has caught the glory of 
his lamentation ! 

Ellisland, where he went later, and where he hoped 
to redeem his farm-promise, was not over-fertile ; it had 
been hardly used by scurvy tenants before him, and 
was so stony that a rain-storm made a fresh-rolled field 
of sown barley look like a paved street. He tells us 
this ; and we farmers know what it means. But it lay 
in iNithsdale ; and the beauty of Nithsdale shed a regal 
splendor on his home. It was the poet that had chosen 
the farm, and not the grain-grower. 

Then there were the " callants " coming from Edin- 
burgh, from Dumfries, from London, from all the world, 
to have their " crack " with the peasant-poet, who had 
sung the " Lass of Ballochmyle." Can this man, whose 
tears drip (in verse) for a homeless field-mouse, keep by 
the plough, when a half-score of good-fellows are up 
from Dmufries to see him, and when John Barleycorn 
stands frothing in the cupboard ? 

Consider, again, that his means, notwithstanding the 



278 WET DAYS. 

showy and short - lived generosity of his Edinburgh 
friends, enabled him only to avail himself of the old 
Scotch plough ; his harrow, very likely, had wooden 
teeth ; he could ventm'e nothing for the clearing of 
gorse and broom ; he could enter upon no system of 
drainage, even of the simple kind recommended by Lord 
Kames ; he had hardly funds to buy the best quality of 
seed, and none at all for " liming," or for " wrack " from 
the shore. Even the gift of a pretty heifer he repays 
with a song. 

Besides all this, he was exciseman ; and he loved 
galloping over the hills in search of recreants, and cosy 
sittings in the tap of the " Jolly Beggars " of Mauchline, 
lietter than he loved a sight of the stunted barley of 
Ellisland. 

No wonder that he left his farm ; no wonder that he 
went to Dumfries, — shabby as the street might be 
where he was to live ; no wonder, that, with his mad 
pride and his impulsive generosity, he died there, leav- 
ing wife and children almost beggars. But, in all char- 
ity, let us remember that it is not alone the poor excise- 
man who is dead, but the rare poet, who has intoned a 
prayer for ten thousand lips, — 

" That He, who stills the raven's clamorous nest, 

And decks the lily fair in flowery pride, 
"Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best. 

For them and for their little ones provide, 
But chiefly in their hoarls wilh grace divine preside." 



BURNS AND BLOOMFIELD. 279 

Let no one fancy that Burns was a poor farmer 
because he was a poet: he was a poor farmer simply 
because he gave only his hand to the business, and 
none of his brain. He had enough of good sense and 
of clear-sightedness to sweep away every agricultural 
obstacle in his path, and to make Ellisland " pay well " ; 
but good-fellowship, and the " Jolly Beggars," and his 
excise-galloping among the hills by Nithsdale made an 
end of the farmer, — and, in due time, made an end of 
the man. 

Robert Bloomfield was another poet-farmer of these 
times, but of a much humbler calibre. I could never 
give any very large portion of a wet day to his reading. 
There is truthfulness of description in him, and a 
certain grace of rhythm, but nothing to kindle any glow. 
The story of Giles, and of the milking, and of the spot- 
ted heifers, may be true enough ; but every day, in my 
barn-yard, I find as true and as lively a story. The 
fact is, that the details of farm-life — the muddy boots, 
the sweaty workers, the amber-colored pools, the wal- 
lowing pigs — are not of a kind to warrant or to call 
out any burning imprint of verse. Theme for this lies 
in the breezes, the birds, the waving-wooded mountains 
(Ni7/DtTov elvo(Ti(j>vXXov), the glorious mornings 

" Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy,' ' 
— and for these the poet must soar above the barn- 
yard and the house-tops. There is more of the spirit 



280 WET DAYS. 

of true poesy in that little fragment of Jean Ingelow's, 
beginning, — 

" "What change has made the pastures sweet, 
And reached the daisies at my feet, 
And cloud that wears a golden hem ? " 

than in all the verse of Bloomfield, if all of Bloomfield 
were compressed into a single song. And yet, if we 
had lived in those days, we should all have subscribed 
for the book of the peasant-bard, perhaps have read 
it, — but, most infallibly, have given it away to some 
country-cousin. 

Country/ Story- Tellers. 

WILL not leave the close of the last century with- 
out paying my respects to good Mrs. Barbauld, — ■ 
not so much for her pleasant " Ode to Spring," about 
which there is a sweet odor of the fields, as for her part- 
nership in those "Evenings at Home" which afe asso- 
ciated — I scarce can remember how — with roaring 
fires and winter nights in the country ; and not less 
strongly with the first noisy chorus of the frogs in the 
pools, and the first coy uplift of the crocuses and the 
sweet violets. There are pots of flowers, and glowing 
fruit-trees, and country hill-sides scattered up and down 
those little stories, which, though my eye has not 
lighted on them these twenty odd years past, are still 



COUNTRY STORY-TELLERS. 281 

fresh in my mind, and full of a sweet pastoral fragrance. 
The sketches may be very poor, with kw artist-like 
touches in them ; it may be only a boyish caprice by which 
I cling to them ; but what pleasanter or more grateful 
whim to cherish than one which brings back all the 
aroma of childhood in the country, — floating upon the 
remnant-patches of a story that is only half recalled ? 
The cowslips are there ; the pansies are there ; the 
overhanging chestnuts are there ; the dusty high-road 
is there ; the toiling wagons are there ; and, betimes, 
the rain is dripping from the cottage-eaves — as the 
rain is dripping to-day. 

And from Mrs. Barbauld I am led away to speak of 
Miss Austen, — belonging, it is true, to a little later date, 
and the tender memory of her books to an age that had 
outgrown " Evenings at Home." Still, the association 
of her tales is strongest with the country, and with 
country - firesides. I sometimes take up one of her 
works upon an odd hour even now ; and how like find- 
ing old-garret clothes — big bonnets and scant skirts — 
is the reading of such old-time story ! How the " pro- 
prieties " our grandmothers taught us come drifting back 
upon the tide of those buckram conventionalities of the 
" Dashwoods " ! * Ah, Marianne, how we once loved 
3^ou ! All, Sir John, how we once thought you a pro- 
fane swearer ! — as you really were. 

* /Sense and Sensibility. 



282 WET DAYS. 

There are people we know between the covers of 
Miss Austen : Mrs. Jennings has a sphitter of tease, 
and crude incivility, and shapeless tenderness, that you 
and I see every day ; — not so patent and demonstra- 
tive in our friend IMrs. Jones ; but the difference is only 
in fashion : Mrs. Jennings was in scant petticoats, and 
Mrs. Jones wears hoops, thirty springs strong. 

How funny, too, the old love - talk ! " My beloved 
Amanda, the chann of your angelic features enraptures 
my regard." It is earnest ; but it 's not the way those 
things are done. 

And what visions such books recall of the days when 
they were read, — the girls in pinafores, — the boys in 
roundabouts, — the elders looking languishingly on, 
when the reader comes to tender passages ! And was 
not a certain Mary Jane another Ellinor? And Avas 
not Louisa (who lived in the two - story white house 
on the corner) another Marianne, — gushing, tender ? 
Yes, by George, she was ! (that was the form our boy- 
ish oaths took). And was not the tall fellow who of- 
fered his arm to the girls so gravely, and saw them 
home from our evening visits so cavalierly, — was 
he not another gay deceiver, — a Lothario, a "Wil- 
loughby ? He could kiss a girl on the least provoca- 
tion ; he took pay out, for his escort, that way. It 
was wonderful, — the fellow's effrontery. It never for- 
sook him. I do not know about the romance in his 



COUNTRY STORY-TELLERS. 283 

family ; but he went into the grocery - line, and has 
become a contractor now, enormously rich. He offers 
his arm to Columbia, who wishes to get home before 
dark ; and takes pay in rifling her of golden kisses. 
Yes, by George, he does ! 



NINTH DAY. 



British Progress in Agriculture. 

S I sit in my library-chair listening to the welcome 
drip from the eaves, I bethink me of the great 
host of English farm-teachers who in the last century 
wrote and wrought £0 well, and wonder why their pre- 
cepts and their example should not have made a gar- 
den of that little British island. To say nothing of 
the inherited knowledge of such men as Sir Anthony 
Fitz - herbert, Hugh Piatt, Markham, Lord Bacon, 
Hartlib, and the rest, there was TuU, who had blazed a 
new path between the turnip and the wheat-drills — 
to fortune ; there was Lord Karnes, who illustrated \n\h. 
rare good sense, and the daintiness of a man of letters, 
all the economies of a thrifty husbandry ; Sir John Sin- 
clair proved the wisdom of thorough culture upon 
tracts that almost covered counties ; Bakev/ell (of 
Dishley) — that fine old farmer in breeches and top- 
boots, who received Russian princes and French mar- 
quises at his kitchen-fireside — demonstrated how fat 



BRITISH PROGRESS IN AGRICULTURE. 285 

might be laid on sheep or cattle for the handling of a 
butcher ; in fact, he succeeded so far, that Dr. Parkin- 
son once told Paley that the great breeder had " the 
power of fattening his sheep in whatever part of the 
body he chose, directing it to shoulder, leg, or neck, 
as he thought proper, — and this," continued Parkin- 
son, is the great problem of his art." 

" It s a lie, Sir," said Paley, — " and that 's the solu- 
tion of it." 

Besides Bakewell, there was Arthur Young, as we 
have seen, giving all England the benefit of agricul- 
tural comparisons by his admirable " Tours " ; Lord 
Dundonald had brought his chemical knowledge to the 
aid of good husbandry ; Abercrombie and Speechley 
and ^larshal had written treatises on all that regarded 
good gardening. The nurseries of Tottenham Court 
Road, the parterres of Chelsea, and the stoves of the 
Kew Gardens w^ere luxuriant witnesses of what the en- 
terprising gardener might do. 

Agriculture, too, had a certain dignity given to it by 
the fact that " Farmer George " (the King) had writ- 
ten his experiences for a journal of Arthur Young, the 
Duke of Bedford was one of the foremost advocates 
of improved farming, and Lord Tov/nshend took a pride 
in his sobriquet of " Tm-nip Townshend." 

Yet, for all this, at the opening of the present century, 
England was by no means a garden. Over more than 



286 WET DAYS. 

half the Idngdom, turnips, where sown at all, were sov/n 
broadcast. In four counties out of five, a bare follow 
was deemed essential for the recuperation of cropped 
lands. Barley and oats were more often grown than 
wheat. Dibbling or drilling of grain, notwithstanding 
Piatt and Jethro TuU, were still rare. The Avet clay- 
lands had, for the most part, no drainage, save the open 
furrows which were as old as the teachings of Xeno- 
phon ; indeed, it will hardly be credited, when I state 
that it is only so late as 1843 that a certain gardener, 
John Reade by name, at the Derby Show of the Royal 
Agricultural Society, exhibited certain cylindrical pipes, 
which he had formed by wrapping damp clay around a 
smooth billet of wood, and with vAich he " had been 
in the habit of draining the hot-beds of his master." 
A sagacious engineer who was present, and saw these, 
examined them closely, and, calling the attention of 
Earl SjDcncer (the eminent agriculturist) to them, said, 
" My Lord, with these I can drain all England." 

It was not until about 1830 that the subsoil-plough 
of Mr. Smith of Deanston was first contrived for 
special work upon the lands of Perthshire. Notwith- 
standing all the brilliaiit successes of Bakewell, long- 
legged, raw-boned cattle were admired by the majority 
of British farmers at the opening of this century, and 
elephantine monsters of this description were dragged 
about England in vans for exhibition. It was only in 



BRITISH PROGRESS IN AGRICULTURE. 287 

1798 that the '• Smithfield Ckib"was inaugurated for 
the show of fat cattle, by the Duke of Bedford, Lord 
Somerville, Arthur Young, and others ; and it was 
about the sanie period that young Jonas "Webb used to 
ride upon the Norfolk bucks bred by his grandfather, 
and, with a quick sense of discomfort from their sharp 
backs, vowed, that, when he " grew a man, he 'd make 
better saddles for them " ; and he did, — as every one 
knows who has ever seen a good type of the Brabaham 
flock. 

The Royal Agricultural Society dates from 1838. 
In 1835 Sir Robert Peel presented a farmers' club at 
Tamworth Avith " two iron ploughs of the best construc- 
tion," and v/hen he inquired after them and their work 
the following year, the report was that the wooden 
mould-board was better : " We tried 'em, but we be all 
of one mind, that the iron made the weeds grow." 
And I can recall a bright morning in January of 1845, 
when I made two bouts around a field in the m.iddle of 
the best dairy-district of Devonshire, at the stilts of a 
plough so cumbi-ous and ineffective that a thrifty New- 
England farmer would have discarded it at sight. Nor 
can I omit, in this connection, to revive, so far as I 
may, the linage of a small Devon farmer, who had lived, 
and I dare say will die, utterly ignorant of the instruc- 
tions of Tull, or of the agricultural labors of Arthur 
Young : a short, wheezy, rotund figure of a man, with 



288 WET DAYS. 

ruddy face, — fastening the hs in his talk most bhmder- 
ingly, — driving over to the market-town every fair- 
day, with pretty samples of wheat or barley in his dog- 
cart, — believing in the royal family like a gospel, — 
limiting his i-eading to glances at the " Times " in the 
tap-room, — looking with an evil eye upon railways, 
(which, in that day, had not intruded firther than Exe- 
ter into his shire,) — distrusting terribly the spread 
of " eddication " : it " doan't help the work-folk any ; 
for, d' ye see, they 've to keep a mind on their pleughing 
and craps ; and as for the b'ys, the big uns must mind 
the beasts, and the little uns 's got enough to do a-scar- 
ing the denied rooks. Gads ! what hodds to them, 
please your Honor, what Darby is a-dooin' up in Lun- 
nun, or what Lewis-Philup is a-dooin' with the French- 
ers ? " And the ruddy farmer-gentleman stirs his toddy 
afresh, lays his right leg caressingly over his left leg, 
admires his white-topped boots, and is the picture of 
British complacency. I hope he is living ; I hope he 
stirs his toddy still in the tap-room of the inn by the 
pretty Erme River ; but I hope that he has grown wiser 
as he has grown older, and that he has given over his 
wheezy curses at the engine as it hurtles past on the 
iron way to Plymouth and to Penzance. 

Thus we find that the work was not all done for the 
agriculture and the agriculturist of England in the last 
centurv ; it is hardlv all done vet ; it is dor.btful if it 



OPENING OF THE CENTURY. 289 

will be done so as to close investigation and ripen 
method in our time. There was room for a corps of 
fresh workers at the opening of the j)resent century ; 
nor was such a corps lacking. 



Opening of the Qentury. 

A BOUT the year 1808, John Christian Curwen, 
-^-^ Member of Parliament, and dating from Cum- 
berland, wrote " Hints on Agricultural Subjects," a big 
octavo volume, in which he suggests the steaming of 
potatoes for horses, as a substitute for hay ; but it does 
not appear that the suggestion was well received. To 
his credit, however, it may be said, that, in the same 
book, he urged the system of " soiling " cattle, — a sys- 
tem which even now needs its earnest expoundei*s, and 
which would give full warrant for their loudest exhor- 
tation. 

I notice, too, that, at about the same period. Dr. Bed- 
does, the friend and early patron of Sir Humphry Davy 
at the Pneiunatic Institution of Bristol, wrote a book 
with the quaint title, " Good Advice to Husbandmen 
in Harvest, and for all those who labor in Hot Berths, 
and for others who will take it — in "Warm Weather." 
And with the recollection of Davy's description of the 
Doctor in my mind, — " uncommonly short and fat," * 

* Life of Sir Humphry Davy, London, 1839, p. 40. 
19 



290 WET DAYS. 

— I have felt a great interest in seeing what such a 
man should have to say upon harvest-heats ; but his 
book, so far as I know, is not to be found in America. 

John Harding, o£ St. James Street, London, published, 
in 1809, a tract ujDon " The Use of Sugar in Feeding 
Cattle," in which were set forth sundry experiments 
which went to shoAv how bullocks had been fattened on 
molasses, and had been rewarded with a premium. I 
am indebted for all knowledge of this anomalous trac- 
tate to the " Agricultural Biography " of Mr. Donaldson, 
who seems disposed to give a sheltering wing to the 
curious theory broached, and discourses upon it with 
a lucidity and coherence worthy of a state-paper. I 
must be permitted to quote Mr. Donaldson's langaiage : 

— " The author's ideas are no romance or chimera, but 
a very feasible entertainment of the undertaking, when 
a social revolution permits the fruits of all climes to be 
used in freedom of the burden of value that is imposed 
by monopoly, and restricts the legitimate appropriation." 

George Adams, in 1810, proposed "A New System 
of Agriculture and Feeding Stock," of which the nov- 
elty lay in movable sheds, (upon iron tram-ways,) for 
the purpose of soiling cattle. The method was cer- 
tainly original ; nor can it be regarded as wholly vis- 
ionary in our time, when the iron conduits of Mr. 
Mechi, under the steam-thrust of the Tip-Tree en- 
gines, are showing a percentage of profit. 



SIR HUMPHRY DAVY. 291 

Charles Drury, in the same year, recommended, in 
an elaborate treatise, the steaming of straw, roots, and 
hay, for cattle-food, — a recommendation which, in our 
time, has been put into most successful practice.* 

Mowbray, who was for a long time the great author- 
ity upon Domestic Fowls and their Treatment, pub- 
lished his book in 1803, which he represents as having 
been compiled from the memoranda of forty years' 
experience. 



Sir Humphry Davy. 

n^TTEXT, as illustrative of the rural literature of the 
-^ ' early part of this century, I must introduce the au- 
gust name of Sir Humphry Davy. This I am warranted 
in doing on two several counts : first, because he was an 
accomplished fisherman and the author of " Salmonia," 
and next, because he Avas the first scientific man of 
any repute who was formally invited by a Board of 
Agriculture to discuss the relations of Chemistry to the 
practice of farming. 

Unfortunately, he was himself ignorant of practical 
agriculture,! when called upon to illustrate its relations 

* The success of the method has been most abundantly proved, so 
far as relates to the feeding of milch-cows; for beef- or store -cattle 
steamed food is of more doubtful policy, while" for horses the best 
breeders condemn it without reserve. 

t See letter of Thomas Poole, p. 322, Frngmentary Remains of Sir 
JIumphry Davy. 



292 WET DAYS. 

to chemistry ; but, like an earnest man, he set about 
informing himself by communication with the best farm- 
ers of the kingdom. lie delivered a very admirable 
series of lectures, and it was without doubt most agree- 
able to the country-gentlemen to find the great waste 
from their fermenting manures made clear by Sir 
Humphry's retorts ; but Davy was too profound and 
too honest a man to lay down for farmers any chemi- 
cal high-road to success. He directed and stimulated 
inquiry ; he developed many of the principles which 
underlay their best practice ; but he offered them no 
safety-lamp. I think he brought more zeal to his in- 
vestigations in the domain of pure science ; he loved 
well-delined and brilliant results ; and I do not think 
that he pushed his inquiries in regard to the way in 
which the forage-plants availed themselves of sulphate 
of lime with one-half the earnestness or delight with 
which he conducted his discovery of the integral char- 
acter of chlorine, or with which he saw for the first 
time the metallic globules bubbling out from the elec- 
trified crust of potash. 

Yet he loved the country with a rare and thorough 
love, as his descriptions throughout his letters prove ; 
and he delighted in straying away, in the leafy month 
of June, to the charming place of his friend Knight, 
upon the Teme in Herefordshire. His " Salmonia " is, 
in its way, a pastoral ; not, certainly, to be compared 



SIR HmiPHRY DAVY. 293 

with the original of Walton, lacking its simple homeli- 
ness, for which its superior scientific accuracy can make 
but poor amends. I cannot altogether forget, in read- 
ing it, that its author is a fine gentleman from London. 
Neither fish, nor alders, nor eddies, nor purling shal- 
lows, can drive out of memory the fact that Sir Hum- 
phry must be back at " The Hall " by half-past six, in 
season to dress for dinner. "Walton, in slouch-hat, 
boimd about with " leaders," sat upon the green turf 
to listen to a milkmaid's song. Sir Humphry (I think 
he must have carried a camp-stool) recited some verses 
written by " a noble lady long distinguished at court." * 

In fact, there was always a great deal of the fine gen- 
tlenian about the great chemist, — almost too fine for 
the quiet tenor of a Avorking-life. Those first brilliant 
successes of his professional career at the Royal Insti- 
tution of London, before he was turned of thirty, and in 
which his youth, his sjDlendid elocution, his happy dis- 
coveries, his attractive manner, all made him the mark 
for distinguished attentions, went very far, I fancy, to 
carry him to that stage of social intoxication under 
which he Avas deluded into marrying a wealthy lady of 
fashion, and a confirmed blue-stocking, — the brilliant 
Mrs. Apreece. 

Little domestic comfort ever came of the marriage. 
Yet he was a chivalrous man, and took the issue calmly. 

* Salmonia, p. 5, London, Murray, 1851. 



294 WET DAYS. 

It is always in his letters, — " My dear Jane," and " God 
bless you! Yours affectionately ." But these expres- 
sions bound the tender passages. It was altogether a 
gentlemanly and a lady-like affair. Only once, as I can 
find, he forgets himself in an honest repining ; it is in 
a letter to his brother, under date of October 30, 
1823 : * — "To add to ray annoyances, I find my house, 
as usual, after the arrangements made by the mistress of 
it, without female servants ; but in this world we have 
to suffer and bear, and from Socrates down to humble 
mortals, domestic discomfort seems a sort of philosoph- 
ical fate." 

If only Lady Davy could have seen this Xantippe 
touch, I think Sir Humphry would have taken to 
angling in some quiet country-place for a month there- 
after ! 

And even when affairs grow serious with the Baro- 
net, and when, stricken by the palsy, he is loitering 
among the moimtains of Styria, he writes, — "I am 
glad to hear of your perfect restoration, and with health 
and the society of London, which you are so fitted to 
ornament and enjoy, your ' viva lafelicita ' is much more 
secure than any hope belonging to me." 

And again, " You once talked of passing this winter in 
Italy ; but I hope your plans will be entirely guided by 
the state of your health and feelings. Your society 

* Fragmentary Remains, p. 2-42. 



SIR HUMPHRY DAVY. 295 

would undoubtedly be a very great resource to me, 
but I am so well aware of my own present unfitness for 
society that I would not have you risk the chance of an 
uncomfortable moment on my account," 

The dear Lady Jane must have had a penchant for 
society to leave a poor palsied man to tumble into his 
tomb alone. 

Yet once again, in the last letter he ever writes, dated 
Rome, March, 1829, he gallantly asks her to join him ; 
it begins, — "I am still alive, though expecting every 
hour to be released." 

And the Lady Jane, who is Avasliing off her fashiona- 
ble humors in the fashionable waters of Bath, writes, — 
" I have received, my beloved Sir Humphry, the letter 
signed by your hand, with its precious wish of tender- 
ness. I start to-morrow, having been detained here by 

Doctors Babington and Clarke till to-day I 

cannot add more " (it is a letter of half a page) " than 
that yoiu- fame is a deposit, and your memory a glory, 
your life still a hope." 

Sweet Lady Jane ! Yet they say she mourned him 
duly, and set a proper headstone at his grave. But, for 
my own part, I have no faith in that affection which will 
splinter a loving heart every day of its life, and yet, 
when it has ceased to beat, will make atonement with 
an idle swash of tears. 



296 WET DAYS. 

Birhheck, Beatson, and Finlayson. 

THERE was a British farmer by the name of Mor- 
ris Birkbeck, wlio about the year 1814 wrote an 
account of an agricultural tour in France ; and who 
subsequently established himself somewhere upon our 
"Western pi-airies, of which he gave account in " Letters 
from Illinois," and in " Notes on a Journey in America, 
from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois," 
with maps, etc. Cobbett once or twice names him as 
" poor Birkbeck," — but whether in allusion to his hav- 
ing been drowned in one of our Western rivers, or to 
the poverty of his agricultural successes, it is hard to 
determine. 

In 1820 Major-General Beatson, who had been Aid 
to the Marquis of Wellesley in India, published an ac- 
count of a new system of fanning, M^hich he claimed to 
have in successful operation at his place in the County 
of Sussex. Tlie novelty of the system lay in the fact 
that he abandoned both manures and the plough, and 
scarified the surface to the depth of two or three inches, 
after which he burned it over. The Major-General was 
called to the governorship of St. Helena before his sys- 
tem had made nuich progress. I am led to allude to 
the plan as one of the j^remonitory hints of that rotary 
method which is just now enlisting a large degree of 
attention in the agricultural world, and which promises 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 297 

to supplant the plough on all vnde stretches of land, 
within the present century. 

Finlaj-son, a brawny Scot, born in the parish of 
Mauchline, who was known from " Glentuck to the 
Rutton-Ley " as the best man for " putting the stone," 
or for a " hop, step, and leap," contrived the self-cleaning 
ploughs (with circular beam) and harrows which bore 
his name. He M^as also — besides being the athlete of 
Ayrshire — ^ the author of sundry creditable and practi- 
cal works on agriculture. 

William Cohhett. 

»UT the most notable man in connection with rural 
literature, of this day, 'was, by all odds, William 
Cobbett. His early history has so large a flavor of 
romance in it that I am sure my readers will excuse me 
for detailing it. 

His grandfather was a day-laborer; he died before 
Cobbett was born ; but the author says that he used to 
visit the grandmother at Christmas and l^liitsuntide. 
Her home was " a little thatched cottage, with a garden 
before the door. She used to give us milk and bread 
for breakfast, an apple-pudding for dinner, and a piece 
of bread and cheese for our supper. Her fire was made 
of turf cut from the neighboring heath ; and her evening 
light was a rush dipped in grease." His father was a 



298 WET DAYS. 

small farmer, and one who did not allow his boys to 
grow up in idleness. " My first occupation," he tells us, 
" was driving the small birds from the turnip-seed, and 
the rook from the pease ; when I first trudged a-field, 
with my wooden bottle and my satchel swung over my 
shoulders, I was hardly able to climb the gates and 
stiles ; and at the close of the day, to reach home was a 
task of infinite difficulty." * 

At the age of eleven he speaks of himself as occupied 
in clipping box-edgings and weeding flower-beds in the 
garden of the Bishop of Winchester ; and while here 
he encounters, one day, a workman who has just come 
from the famous Kew Gardens of the King. Young 
Cobbett is fired by the glowing description, and resolves 
that he must see them, and work upon them too. So he 
sets oif, one summer's morning, with only the clothes he 
has upon his back, and with thirteen halfpence in his 
pocket, for Richmond. And as he trudges through the 
streets of the town, after a hard day's walk, in his blue 
smock-frock, and with his red garters tied under his 
knee:/, staring about him, he sees in the window of a 
bookseller's shop the " Tale of a Tub," price threepence ; 
it piques his curiosity, and, though his money is nearly 
all spent, he closes a bargain for the book, and throwing 
himself down upon the shady side of a hay-rick, makes 
h.is first acquaintance with Dean Swift. He reads till 

* Life and Adoenluvei of Peter Porcupine. 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 299 

it is dark, AAathout thought of supper or of bed, — then 
tumbles down upon the grass under the shadow of the 
stack, and sleeps till the birds of the Kew Gardens 
wake him. 

He finds work, as he had determined to do ; but it 
was not fated that he should pass his life amid the 
pleasant parterres of Kew. At sixteen, or thereabout, 
on a visit to a relative, he catches his first sight of the 
Channel waters, and of the royal fleet riding at anchor 
at Spithead. And at that sight, the " old Armada,'' 
and the " brave Rodney," and the " wooden walls," of 
which he had read, come drifting like a poem into his 
thought, and he vows that he will become a sailor, — 
maybe, in time, the Admiral Cobbett. But here, too, 
the fates are against him : a kind captain to whom 
he makes application suspects liim for a runaway, and 
advises him to find his way home. 

He returns once more to the plough ; " but " he says, 
" I was now spoiled for a farmer." He sighs for the 
world ; the little horizon of Farnham (his native town) 
is too narrow for him ; and the very next year he makes 
his final escapade, 

" It was on the 6th of May, 1783, that I, like Don Quix- 
ote, sallied forth to seek adventures. I was dressed in 
my holiday clothes, in order to accompany two or three 
lasses to Guildford fair. They were to assemble at a 
house about three miles from my home, where I was to 



300 WET DAYS. 

attend them ; but, unfortunately for me, I had to cross 
the London turnpike-road. The stage-coach had just 
turned the summit of a hill, and was rattling down 
towards me at a merry rate. The notion of going to 
London never entered my mind till this very moment ; 
yet the step Avas completely detennined on before the 
coach had reached the spot where I stood. Up I got, 
and was in London about nine o'clock in the evening." 

His immediate adventure in the metropolis proves to 
be his instalment as scrivener in an attorney's office. 
No wonder he chafes at this ; no v/onder, that, in his 
wanderings about town, he is chaniied by an advertise- 
ment which invited all loyal and public-spirited young 
men to repair to a certain " rendezvous " ; he goes to 
the rendezvous, and presently finds himself a recniit in 
one of His Majesty's regiments which is filling up for 
service in British America. 

He must have been an apt soldier, so far as drill 
v/ent ; for I find that he rose rapidly to the grade of 
corporal, and thence to the position of sergeant-major. 
He tells us that his early habits, his strict attention 
to duty, and his native talent were the occasion of his 
swift promotion. In New Bnmswick, upon a certain 
winter's morning, he falls in with the rosy-faced daughter 
of a sergeant of artillery, who was scrubbing her pans 
at sunrise, upon the snow. " I made up my mind," he 
says, " that she was the very girl for me This 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 301 

matter was at once settled as finiily as if written in the 
book of fate." 

To this end he determines to leave the army as soon 
as possible. But before he can effect this, the artillery- 
man is ordered back to England, and his pretty daugh- 
ter goes with him. But Cobbett has closed the com- 
pact with her, and placed in her hands a hundred and 
fifty pounds of his earnings, — a free gift, and an ear- 
nest of his troth. 

The very next season, however, he meets, in a sweet 
rural solitude of the Province, another charmer, with 
whom he dallies in a lovelorn way for two years or 
more. He cannot quite forget the old ; he cannot cease 
befondling the new. If only the " remotest rumor had 
come," says he, " of the faithlessness of the brunette in 
England, I should have been fastened for life in the 
New-Brunswick valley." But no such rimior comes 5 
and in due time he bids a heart-rending adieu, and 
recrosses the ocean to find his first love maid-of-all-work 
in a gentleman's family at five pounds a year ; and she 
puts in his hand, upon their first interview, the whole of 
the hundred and fifty poimds, untouched. This rekin- 
dles his admiration and respect for her judgment, and 
she becomes his wife, — a wife he never ceases there- 
after to love and honor. 

He goes to France, and thence to America. Es- 
tablishing himself in Philadelphia, he enters upon the 



302 WET DAYS. 

career of authorship, with a zeal for the Ejng, and a 
hatred of Dr. Franklin and all Democrats, which give 
him a world of trouble. Plis foul bitterness of sj^eech 
finds its climax at length in a brutal onslaught upon 
Dr. Rush,^for which he is prosecuted, convicted, and 
mulcted in a sum that breaks down his bookselling and 
interrupts the profits of his authorship. 

He retires to England, opens shop in Pall-Mall, and 
edits the " Porcupine," which bristles v/ith envenomed 
arrows discharged against all Liberals and Democrats. 
Again he is prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned. His 
boys, well taught in all manner of farm-work, send him, 
from his home in the country, hampers of fresh fruits, to 
relieve the tedium of Newgate. Discharged at length, 
and continuing his ribaldry in the columns of the " Reg- 
ister," he flies before an Act of Parliament, and takes 
new refuge in America. He is now upon Long Island, 
earnest as in his youth in agricultural pursuits. His 
political opinions had undergone modification ; there 
was not so much declamation against democracy, — not 
so much angry zeal for royalty and the state-church. 
Nay, he committed the stupendous absurdity of carry- 
ing back with him to England the bones of Tom Paine, 
as the grandest gift he could bestow upon his mother- 
land. No great ovations greeted this strange luggage 
of his ; I think he was ashamed of it afterwards, — if 
Cobbett was ever ashamed of anything. He became 



WILLIAM COBBETT. 303 

cjindidate for Parliament in the Liberal interest ; he un- 
dertook those famous " Rural Rides " which are a rare 
jumble of sweet rural scenes and crazy political objur- 
gation. Now he hammers the " parsons," — now he 
tears the paper-money to rags, — • and anon he is bitter 
upon Malthus, Ricardo, and the Scotch " Feelosofers," 
— and closes his anathema with the charming picture of 
a wooded " hanger," up which he toils (with curses on 
the road) only to rejoice in the view of a sweet Hamp- 
shire valley, over which sleek flocks are feeding, and 
down which some white stream goes winding, and cheat- 
ing him into a rare memory of his innocent boyhood. 
He gains at length his election to Parliament ; but he 
is not a man to figure well there, with his impetuosity 
and lack of self-control. He can talk by the hour to 
those who feel with him ; but to be challenged, to have 
his fierce invective submitted to the severe test of an 
inexorable logic, — this limits his audacity ; and his au- 
dacity once limited, his power is gone. 

His energy, his promptitude, his habits of thrift, would 
have made him one of the best of farmers. His book 
on gardening is even now one of the most instructive 
that can be placed in the hands of a beginner. He 
ignores physiology and botany, indeed; he makes 
crude errors on this score ; but he had an intuitive 
sense of the right method of teaching. He is plain and 
clear, to a comma. He knows what needs to be told ; 



304 WET DAYS. 

and he tells it straiglitforvvardly. There is no better 
model for agrictiltnral v/riters than " Cobbett on Gar- 
dening." 

His " Cottage Economy," too, is a book which every 
small landholder in America should own ; there is a 
sterling merit in it which will not be outlived. He 
made a great mistake, it is true, in insisting that Indian- 
corn could be grown successfully in England. But be- 
ing a man who did not yield to influences of climate 
himself, he did not mean that his crops should ; and if 
he had been rich enough, I believe that he would have 
covei'ed his farm with a glass roof, rather than yield his 
conclusion that Indian-corn could be grown successfully 
imder a British sky. 

A great, impracticable, earnest, headstrong man, the 
like of whom does not appear a half-dozen times in a 
century. Being self-educated, he was possessed, like 
nearly all self-educated men, of a complacency and a 
self-sufficiency which stood always in his way. Affect- 
ing to teach gi'ammar, he was ignorant of all the ety- 
mology of the language ; knowing no word of botany, 
he classified plants by the " fearings " of his turnip-field. 
He was vain to the last degree ; he thought his books 
were the best books in the world, and that everybody 
should read them.* He was industrious, restless, cap- 

* On the fly-leaf to his Woodlands he wrote, — " When I am asked 
what books a young man or young woman should read, I always an- 
swer, ' Let him or her read all the books that I have written." '' 



GRAHAME AND CRABBE. 305 

tious, and, although humane at heart, was the most ma- 
lignant slandei*er of his time. He called a political 
antagonist a " pimp," and thought a crushing argimaent 
lay in the word ; he called parsons scoundrels, and bade 
his boys be regular at church. 

In June, 1835, while the Parliament was in session, 
he grew ill, — talked feebly about politics and farming, 
(to his household,) " wished for ' four days' rain ' for 
the Cobbett corn," and on Wednesday, (1 6th June,) de- 
sired to be carried around the farm, and criticised the 
work that had been done, — grew feeble as evening- 
drew on, and an hour after midnight leaned back heav- 
ily in his chair, and died. 

Grrahame and Crabhe. 

"F MUST give a paragraph, at least, to the Rev. James 
Grahame, the good Scotch parson, were it only 
because he wrote a poem called " British Georgics." 
They are not so good as Virgil's ; nor did he ever think 
it himself. In fact, he published his best poem anony- 
mously, and so furtively that even his wife took up an 
early copy, which she found one day upon her table, and, 
charmed with its pleasant description of Scottish braes 
and burn-sides, said, " Ah ! Jemmy, if ye could only 
mak' a book like this ! " And I will venture to say that 
" Jemmy " never had rarer or pleasanter praise. 

20 



306 WET DAYS. 

I suspect good Mistress Grahame was not a very 
strong-minded woman. 

Crabbe, who was as keen an observer of rm-al scenes 
as the Scotchman, had a much better faculty of verse ; 
indeed, he had a faculty of language so lai-ge that it 
carried him beyond the real drift of his stories. I do 
not knoiv the fact, indeed ; but I think, that, notwith- 
standing the Duke of Rutland's patronage, Mr. Crabbe 
must have written inordinately long sermons. It is 
strange how many good men do, — losing point and 
force and efficiency in a welter of v/ords ! K there is- 
one I'hetorical lesson which it behooves all theologic or 
academic professors to lay down and enforce, (if need 
be with the ferule,) it is this, — Be short. 

George Crabbe wrote charming rural tales ; but he 
wrote long ones. There is minute observation, dra- 
matic force, tender pathos, but there is much of tedious 
and coarse description. If by some subtile alchemy 
tlie better qualities could be thrown down from the tur- 
bid and watery flux of his verse, we should have an 
admirable pocket-volume for the country ; as it is, his 
books rest mostly on the shelves, and it requires a 
strong breath to puff away the dust that has gathered 
on the topmost edges. 

I think of the Reverend Mr. Crabbe as an amiable, 
absent-minded old gentleman, driving about on week- 
days in a heavy, square-topped gig, (his wife holding 



CHARLES LAMB. 307 

the reins,) in search of way-side gypsies, and on Sun- 
day pushing a discourse — which was good up to the 
" fourthly " — into the " seventhly." 

Charles Lamb. 

I^HARLES LAIVIB, if he had been clerically dis- 
^^ posed, would, I am sure, have Avritten short ser- 
mons : and I think that his hearers would have carried 
away the gist of them clean and clear. 

He never wrote anything that could be called strictly 
pastoral ; he was a creature of streets and crowding 
houses ; no man could have been more ignorant of the 
every-day offices of rural life ; I doubt if he ever knew 
from which side a horse was to be mounted pr a cow to 
be milked, and a sprouting bean was a source of the 
greatest wonderment to him. Yet, in spite of all this, 
what a book those Essays of his make, to lie down with 
inider trees ! It is the honest, lovable simplicity of his 
nature that makes the keeping good. He is the Izaak 
Walton of London streets, — of print-shops, of pastry- 
shops, of mouldy book-stalls ; the chime of Bow-bells 
strikes upon his ear like the chorus of a milkmaid's 
song at Ware. 

There is not a bit of rodomontade in him about the 
charms of the country, from beginning to end ; if there 
were, we should despise him. He can find nothing to 



308 WET DAYS. 

say of Skiddaw but that lie is " a great creature " ; and 
he writes to Wordsworth, (whose sight is failing,) on 
Ambleside, " I return you condolence for your decaying 
sight, — ■ not for anything there is to see in the country, 
but for the miss of the pleasure of reading a London 
newspaper." 

And again to his friend Manning, (about the date of 
1800,) — "I am not romance-bit about Nature. The 
earth and sea and sky (when all is said) is but as a 
house to dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and 
good liquors flow like the conduits at an old coronation, 
— if they can talk sensibly, and feel properly, I have 
no need to stand staring upon the gilded looking-glass, 
(that strained my friend's purse-strings in the purchase,) 
nor his five-shilling print, over the mantel-piece, of old 
Nabbs, the carrier. Just as important to me (in a sense) 
is all the furniture of my world, — eye-pampering, but 
satisfies no heart. Streets, streets, . streets, markets, 
theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling 
with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat seam- 
stresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters 
lying, authors in the street with spectacles, lamps lit at 
night, i3astry-cooks' and silver-smiths' shops, beautiful 
Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry 
of mechanic watchmen at night, with bucks reeling 
home drunk, — if you happen to wake at midnight, cries 
of ' Fire ! ' and ' Stop thief ! ' — inns of coiu't with their 



CHARLES LAMB. 309 

learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge 
colleges, — old book-stalls, ' Jeremy Taylors,' '^ Burtons 
on Melancholy,' and ' Religio Medicis,' on every stall. 
These are thy pleasures, O London-with-the-niany-sins ! 

— for these may Keswick and her giant brood go 
hang ! " 

Does any weak-limbed country-liver resent this hon- 
esty of speech ? Surely not, if he be earnest in his ' 
loves and faith ; but, the rather, by such token of un- 
bounded naturalness, he recognizes under the waistcoat 
of this dear, old, charming cockney the traces of close 
cousinship to the Waltons, and binds him, and all the 
simplicity of his talk, to his heart, for aye. There is 
never a hill-side under whose oaks or chestnuts I lounge 
upon a smoky afternoon of August, but a pocket Elia is 
as coveted and as cousinly a companion as a pocket 
Walton, or a \Yliite of Selborne. And upon wet days in 
my library, I conjure up the image of the thin, bent old 
gentleman — Charles Lamb — to sit over against me, 
and I watch his Idndly, beaming eye, as he recites with 
poor stuttering voice, — between the v/hiffs of his pipe, 

— over and over, those always new stories of " Christ's 
Hospital," and the cherished " Blakesmoor," and Mack- 
ery End." 

(No, you need not put back the book, my boy ; 't is 
always in place.) 



310 WET DAYS. 

The Ettrich Shepherd. 

T NEVER admired greatly James Hogg, the Ettrick 
-"- Shepherd ; yet he belongs of double right in the 
coterie of my wet-day preachers. Bred a shepherd, he 
tried farming, and he wrote pastorals. His farming (if 
we may believe contemporary evidence) was by no 
means so good as his verse. The Ettrick Shepherd of 
the " Noctes Ambrosianae " is, I fancy, as much becol- 
ored by the wit of Professor Wilson as any daughter 
of a duchess whom Sir Joshua changed into a nymph. 
I think of Hogg as a sturdy sheep-tender, growing re- 
bellious among the Cheviot flocks, crazed by a reading 
of the Border minstrelsy, drunken on books, (as his 
fellows were with " mountain-dew,") and wreaking his 
vitality on Gaelic rhymes, — which, it is true, have a 
certain blush and aroma of the heather-hills, but which 
never reached the excellence that he fondly imagined 
belonged to them. I fancy, that, v/hen he sat at the 
laird's table, (Sir "Walter's,) and called the laird's lady 
by her baptismal name, and — not abashed in any pres- 
ence — uttered his Gaelic gibes for the wonderment of 
London guests, — that he thought far more of himself 
than the world has ever been inclined to think of him. 
. It may not be commonly known that the Ettrick 
Shepherd was an agricultural author, and wrote " Hogg 
on Sheep," for v-hich, as he tells us, he received the sum 



LOUDON. 311 

of eighty-six pounds. It is an octavo book, and relates 
to the care, management, and diseases of the black-faced 
mountain-breed, of which alone he was cognizant. It 
had never a great reputation ; and I think the sheep- 
farmers of the Cheviots were disposed to look with dis- 
trust upon the teachings of a shepherd who supped with 
" lords " at Abbotsford, and whose best venture in verse 
was in " The Queen's Wake." A British agricultural 
author, speaking of him in a pitiful way, says, — " He 
passed years of busy authorship, and encountered the 
usual difficulties of that penurious mode of life" * 
This is good ; it is as good as anything of Hogg's. 

Loudon. 

T APPROACH the name of Mr. Loudon, the author 
-*- of the Encyclopaedias of Gardening and Agriculture, 
with far more of respect. If nothing else in him laid 
claim to regard, his industry, his earnestness, his in- 
defatigable la])or in aid of all that belonged to the prog- 
ress of British gardening or farming, would demand it. 
I take a pride, too, in saying, that, notwithstanding his 
literary labors, he was successful as a farmer, during 
the short period of his farm-holding. 

Mr. Loudon was a Scotchman by birth, was educated 

* Agricultural Biography, etc. London, 1854. Printed for the 
Author. 



312 WET DAYS. 

in Edinburgh, and was for a time luider the tutelage 
of Mr. Dickson, the famous nurseryman of Leith-Walk. 
Early in the present century he made his first appear- 
ance in London, — contributed to the journals certain 
papers on the laying-out of the public squares of the 
metropolis, and shortly after was employed by the Earl 
of Mansfield in the arrangement of the palace-gar- 
dens at Scone. In 1806 he published a work upon the 
management of country-residences, and at about the 
same period entered upon the business of farming, 
which he followed with great success until 1813. In 
this and the succeeding year he travelled on the Conti- 
nent very widely, making the gardens of most repute 
the special objects of his study; and in 1822 he gave 
to the world his " Encyclopaedia of Gardening " ; that 
on Agriculture followed shortly after, and his book of 
Rural Architecture in 1833. But these labors, enor- 
mous as they were, had interludes of other periodical 
work, and were crowned at last by his inagnum opus, 
the " Arboretum." 

" For months," says Mrs. Loudon, speaking of the 
preparation of the Encyclopaedias, " he and I used to 
sit u}) the greater part of every night, never having 
more than four hours' sleep, and drinking strong coffee 
to keep ourselves awake." And this persistency of 
labor was the more extraordinary from the fact that he 
was a man of naturally feeble constitution, and as early 



LOUDON. 313 

as the date of Iiis first considerable work was broken by 
disease. In tlie year 1806 a night's exposure upon a 
coach-box in travelling brought upon him a rheumatic 
fever which resulted in a permanent anchylosis of the 
left knee. Subsequently his right arm became affected, 
and he submitted to shampooing. In this process it 
was broken so near to the shoulder that it could not be 
set in the usual manner ; somewhat later it was again 
broken, and finally amputated in 1826. Meantime his 
left hand became so affected (rheumatically) that he 
could use only the thu'd and little finger. But though 
afler this time always obliged to employ an amanuensis 
and draughtsman, he wrought on bravely and constantly 
until the year 1843, when he was attacked with infla- 
mation of the lungs. To this, however, he did not 
yield himself a willing prey ; but with his right arm 
gone, his left side paralyzed, his sight miserably defec- 
tive, and his lungs one mass of disease, he kept by his 
desk and his work, up to the very day of his death. 

This veteran author massed together an amount of 
information upon the subjects of which he treated that 
is quite unmatched in the whole annals of agricultural 
literature. Columella, Heresbach, Worlidge, and even 
the writers of the " Geoponica," dwindle into insignifi- 
cance in the comparison. He is not, indeed, always 
absolutely accurate on historical points ; ^< but in all 

* I ouglit, perhaps, to make definite exception in tlie case of a writer 



314 WET DAYS. 

essentials his books are so complete as to have made 
them standard works up to a time long subsequent to 
their issue. 

No notice of the agricultural literature of the early 
part of this century would be at all complete without 
mention of the Magazines and Society " Transactions," 
in which alone some of the best and most scientific 
cultivators communicated their experience or sugges- 
tions to the public. Loudon was hunself the editor of 
the " Gardener's Magazine " ; and the earlier Transac- 
tions of the Horticultural Society are enriched by the 
papers of such men as Knight, Van Mons, Sir Joseph 
Banks, Rev. "William Herbert, Messrs. Dickson, Ha- 
worth, Wedgwood, and others. The works of indi- 
vidual authors lost ground in comparison with such an 
array of reports from scientific observers, and from that 
time forth periodical literature has become the standard 
teacher in what relates to good culture. I do not 
know what extent of good the newly instituted Agri- 

so universally accredited. In his EncyclopoBdia of Gardening, he speaks 
of the Geoponica as the work of "modern Greeks," -nTitten after the 
transfer of the seat of empire to Constantinople ; whereas the bnlk of 
those treatises were written long before that date. He speaks of Varro 
as first in order of time of Eomau authors on agi-iculture ; yet Varro 
was born IIG b. c, and Cato died as early as 149 b. c. Crescenzi he 
names as an author of the fifteenth century; he should be credited to 
the fourteenth. He also commits the very common eiTor in writers on 
gardening, of confounding the Tuscan villa of Pliny with that at Tos- 
culum. These two places of the Soman Consul were enMrely distinct. 
In his Epist. G {Apollinari) Pliny says, ^^ Uabes causes cur ego Tuscos 
meos Ttisculanis, Tyburtinis, Pi'mnestinisque ineis prmponnm.'''' 



A BEVY OF POETS. 315 

cultural Collcg-e3 of this country may effect ; but I feel 
quite safe in saying that our agricultiu-al journals will 
prove always the most eiFective teachers of the great 
znass of the farming-population. The London Horti- 
cultural Society at an early day established the Chiswick 
Gardens, and these, managed under the advice of the 
Society's Directors, have not only afforded an accurate 
gauge of British progress in horticulture, but they have 
furnished to the humblest cultivator who has strolled 
through their enclosures practical lessons in the craft of 
gardening. It is to be hoped that the American Agri- 
cultural Colleges will adopt some similar plan, and 
illustrate the methods they teach upon lands which 
shall be o^Den to iDubhc inspection, and upon whose 
culture and its successes systematic reports shall be 
annually made. 



A Bevy of Poets. 

TTTRITING thus, during these in-door hours, of 
^ ^ country-piu'suits, and of those who have illus- 
trated them, or who have in any way quickened the 
edge with which we farmers rasp away the weeds or 
carve out our pastoral entertainment, I come upon the 
names of a great bevy of poets, belonging to the earlier 
quarter of this century, that I find it hard to pass by. 
Much as I love to bring to mind, over and over again, 



316 WET DAYS. 

" Ivanhoe " and " Waverley," I love quite as much to 
summon to my view Walter Scott, the woodsman of 
Abbotsford, with hatchet at his girdle, and the hound 
Maida in attendance. I see him thinning out the sap- 
lings that he has planted upon the Tweed banks. I 
can fancy how the master would have lopped away the 
boughs for a little looplet through which a burst of the 
blue Eildon Hills should come. His favorite seat, 
overshadowed by an arbor-vitce, (of which a leaf lies 
pressed in the " Scotch Tourist " yonder,) Vv-as so near 
to the Tweed banks that the ripple of the stream over 
its pebbly bottom must have made a delightful lullaby 
for the toil-worn old man. But beyond wood-craft, I 
could never discover that Sir "Walter had any strong 
agricultural inclination ; indeed, in one of his letters, 
dated about the time of his commercial involvement^ 
(1826,) he says, — after enumerating other prospective 
retrenchments, — " then I give up an expensive farm, 
which I always hated, and turn all my odds and ends 
into cash." * Again, (and I count this a surer indica- 
tion,) he puts in the mouth of Cromwell (" Woodstock ") 
a mixed metaphor of which no apt farmer could have 
been guilty. The Puritan general is speaking of the 
arch - loyalist Dr. Rochecliffe, and says, " I know his 
stiffneckedness of old, though I have made him plough 
in ray furrow, when he thought he was turning up his 

* Lockhart's Life, Vol. IV. ch. i. 



A BEVY OF POETS. 317 

own s^vathe.'" Nor do I tliink that the old gentleman 
had much eye for the picturesque ; no landscaj^e-gar- 
dener of any reputation would have decided upon such 
a site for such a pile as that of Abbotsford : * the spot 
is low ; the views are not extended or varied ; the very 
trees are all of Scott's planting ; but the master loved 
the murmur of the Tw^eed, — loved the nearness of 
Melrose, and in every old bit of sculpture that he 
walled into his home he found pictures of far-away 
scenes that printed in vague shape of tower or abbey 
all his limited horizon. 

Christopher North carried his Scotch love of moun- 
tains to his home among the English lakes. I think 
he counted Skiddaw something more than " a great 
creature." In all respects — saving the pipes and the 
ale — he was the very opposite of Charles Lamb. And 
yet do we love him more? A stalwart, hearty man, 
with a great redundance of flesh and blood, who could 
"put the stone" with Finlayson, or climb with the 
hardiest" of the Ben-Nevis guides, or cast a fly with the 
daintiest of the Low^-Country fishers, — redundant of 
imagination, redundant of speech, and with such exu- 

* This is the more remarkable as Scott wrote most appreciatively 
on the subject of landscape-gardening. I allude particularly to that 
charming essay of his in the Quarlerhj Review for IMarch, 1828, based 
upon Sir Henry Steuart's scheme for the safe removal of large forest- 
trees, — a scheme which unforfimately promised more than it has per- 
foiined. 



318 WET DAYS. 

berance in him that we feel surfeit from the overflow, 
as at the reading of Spenser's " Faery Queene " and 
lay him down with a v/earisome sense of mental indi- 
gestion. 

Nor yet is it so much an indigestion as a feeling of 
plethora, due less to the froth iness of the condiments 
than to a certain fulness of blood and brawn. The 
broad-shouldered Christopher, in his shooting-jacket, (a 
dingy green velveteen, with pocket-pouches all stuffed,) 
strides away along the skirts of Cruachan or Loch 
Lochy with such a tearing pace, and greets every lassie 
with such a clamorous outbreak of song, and throws 
such a wonderful stretch of line upon every pool, and 
amazes us with such stupendous " strikes " and such a 
whizzing of his reel, that we fairly lose our breath. 

Not so of the " White Doe of Eylstone " ; nay, we 
more incline to doze over it than to lose our breath. 
Wilson differs from Wordsworth as Loch Awe, with 
its shaggy savagery of shore, from the Sunday quie- 
tude and beauty of Eydal- Water. The Strid of Words- 
worth was bounded by the slaty banks of the " Crystal 
Whai-f," and the Strid of Wilson, in his best moments, 
was as large as the valley of Glencoe. Yet Words- 
worth loved intensely all the more beautiful aspects of 
the country, and of country-life. No angler and no 
gardener, indeed, — too severely and proudly medita- 
tive for any such sleight-of-hand. The only great weight 



A BEVY OF POUTS. 319 

which he ever lifted, I suspect, was one wliich he 
cai-ried with him ahvays, — the immense dignity of his 
poetic priesthood. His home and its surroundings were 
fairly typical of his tastes : a cottage, (so called,) of 
homely material indeed, but with an ambitious elevation 
of gables and of chuuney-stacks ; a velvety sheen of 
turf, as dapper as that of a suburban haberdasher ; a 
mossy urn or two, patches of flowers, but rather fragrant 
than showy ones ; behind him the loveliest of wooded 
hills, all toned dov/n by graceful culture, and before 
him the silvery miirors of Windermere and Rydal- 
Water. 

"We have to "credit hun with some rare and tender de- 
scription, and fragments of great poems ; but I cannot 
help thinking that he fancied a profounder meaning lay 
in tliem than the world has yet detected. 

John Clare was a contemporary of Wordsworth's, and 
was most essentially a poet of the fields. His father 
was a pauper and a cripple ; not even young Cobbett 
was so pressed to the glebe by the circumstances of his 
birth. But the thrushes taught Clare to sing. He 
wrote verses upon the lining of his hat-band. He 
hoarded halfpence to buy Thomson's " Seasons," and 
walked seven miles before sunrise to make the pur- 
chase. The hardest field-toil could not repress the 
poetic aspirations of such a boy. By dint of new- 
hoardings he succeeded in printing verses of his own ; 



320 WET DAYS. 

but nobody read them. He wrote other verses, which 
at length made him known. The world flattered the 
peasant - bard of Northamptonshire. A few distin- 
guished patrons subscribed the means for equipping a 
farm of his own. The heroine of his love-tales became 
its mistress ; a shelf or two of books made him rich ; 
but in an evil hour he entered upon some farm-specu- 
lation which broke down ; a new poem was sharj^ly 
criticised or neglected; the novelty of his peasant's 
song was over. Disheartened and gloomy, he was over- 
whelmed with despondency, and became the inmate of 
a mad - house, where for forty years he has staggered 
idiotically toward the rest which did not come. But 
even as I write I see in the British papers that he is 
free at last. Poor Clare is dead. 

With this sad story in mind, we may read with a zest 
which j^erhaps its merit alone would not provoke his 
little sonnet of " The Thrush's Nest " : — 

" Within a tliick and spreading hawtliorn-bush, 
That overhung a mole-hill large and round, 
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrxish 
Sing hymns of rapture, while I drank the soimd 
With joy; and oft, an unintruding guest, 
I -watched her secret toils from day to day, — 
How true she warped tlie moss to form her nest. 
And modelled it within with wood and clay, 
And by-and-hy, like heath-bells gilt with dew, 
There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowers, 



A BEVY OF POET'S. 321 

Ink-spotted over, shells of green and blue ; 
And there I witnessed, in the summer houi's, 
A brood of Nature's minstrels chii-p and fly, 
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky." 

Tliere are pretty snatches of a Southern May in 
Hunt's poem of " Rhnini," where 

" sky, earth, and sea 
Breathe like a bright-ej-ed face that laughs out openly. 
'T is Nature full of spirits, waked and springing: 
The birds to the delicious tune are singing. 
Darting with freaks and snatches up and down, 
"Where the light woods go seaward from the town ; 
WhOe happy faces striking through the gi'een 
Of leafy roads at everv' tiu-n are seen; 
And the far, ships, lifting their sails of white 
Like joyful hauids, come up witli scattery light. 
Come gleaming up true to the wished-for day, 
And chase the whistling brine, and swirl into the bay." 

This does not sound as if it came from the prince of 
cockneys ; and I have always felt a certain regard for 
Leigh Hunt, too, by reason of the tender story which 
he gives of the little garden, " mio jncciol orto" that he 
established during his two years of prisonhood.* 

But, after all, there was no robustness in his rural 
spirit, — nothing that makes the cheek tingle, as if a 
smart wind had smitten it. He Avas born to handle 
roses without thorns ; I think that with a pretty boudoii-, 

* Lord Byron and his Contempoi'aries, Vol. II. p. 2-58. 
21 



322 WET DAYS. 

on wliose table every morning a pretty maid should 
arrange a pretty nosegay, and with a pretty canary to 
sing songs in a gilded cage, and pretty gold-fish to dis- 
port in a crystal vase, and basted partridges for dinner, 
his love for the country would have been satisfied. He 
loved Nature as a sentimental boy loves a fine woman 
of twice his years, — sighing himself away in *pretty 
phrases that flatter, but do not touch her ; there is noth- 
ing to remind, even, of the full, abounding, fiery, all- 
conquering love with which a full-grown man meets and 
marries a yielding maiden. 

In poor John Keats, however, there is something of 
this ; and under, its heats he consumed away. For 
riiDe, joyous outburst of all rural fancies, — for keen 
apprehension of Vv^hat most takes hold of the suscepti- 
bilities of a man who loves the country, — for his coin- 
age of all sweet sounds of birds, all murmiu* of leaves, 
all riot and blossoming of flowers, into fragrant verse, 
— he was without a peer in his day. It is not that he 
is so true to natural phases in his descriptive epithets, 
not that he sees all, not that he has heard all ; but his 
heart has drunk the incense of it, and his imagination 
refined it, and his fancy set it allow in those jocund 
lines v/hich bound and writhe and exult with a passion- 
ate love for the things of field and air. 



L'ENVOI. 323 



L' Envoi. 



CLOSE these papers, with my eye resting upon the 
same stretch of fields, — the wooded border of a 
river, — the twinkling roofs and spires flanked by hills 
and sea, — where my eye rested when I began this story 
of the old masters with Hesiod and the bean-patches 
of Ithaca. And I take a pleasure in feeling that the 
farm-practice over all the fields below me rests upon the 
cumulated authorship of so long a line of teachers. 
Yon open furrow, over Avhich the herbage has closed, 
carries trace of the ridging in the " Works and Days " ; 
the brown field of half-broken clods is the fallow (Neos) 
of Xenophon ; the drills belong to TVorlidge ,' their 
culture v.'ith the horse-hoe is at the order of Master 
Tull. Young and Cobbett are full of their suggestions ; 
Lancelot Brown has ordered away a great straggling 
hedge-row ; and Sir Uvedale Price has m-ged me to 
spare a hoary maple which lords it over a half-acre of 
flat land, Cato gives orders for the asparagus, and 
Switzer for the hot-beds. Crescenzi directs the wall- 
ing, and Smith of Deanston the ploughing. Burns em- 
balms all my field-mice, and CoAvper drapes an urn for 
me in a tangled wilderness. Knight names my cher- 
ries, and Walton, the kind master, goes with me over 
the hill to a wee brook that bounds down under hem- 
locks and soft maples, for *' a contemplative man's rec- 



324 WET DAYS. 

reation." Davy long ago caught all the fermentation 
of my manure-heap in his retort, and Thomson painted 
for me the scene which is under my -window to-day. 
Mowbray cures the pip in my poultry, and all the songs 
of all the birds are caught and repeated to the echo in 
the pao-es of the poets which lie here under my hand ; 
through the prism of their verse, Patrick the cattle-ten- 
der changes to a lithe milkmaid, against whose ankles 
the buttercups nod rejoicingly, and Rosamund (which 
is the nurse) v/akes all Arden (which is Edgewood) 
with a rich burst of laughter. 



THE END. 


























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